“I never saw so devoted a father as you, Stephen Dallas,” one of his women friends said to him one day, during one of Laurel’s visits. He had been refusing all his invitations.

Stephen Dallas had smiled and shrugged in reply. Most men, he told himself, weren’t obliged to cram a year’s fatherhood into one short month. They could spread it along. And most fathers, or many anyhow, in guiding their children, were not obliged to exert their strength against another pair of oars, constantly pulling in another direction.

When Laurel came to visit her father for the first time he used every device and scheme he could think of to make her want to come again. It was always a little like that. Surprising, he said to himself, that he was so anxious for her to want to come again. He would think it more normal, wrapped up as he was in his business, and dead as was all desire in connection with the mistaken marriage he had made during the early years of his career in Milhampton, if he had wished to forget and bury everything related to it. Let other people forget and bury it too. If Laurel had been a boy who would grow up to bear his name, he might understand his hopes and ambitions for the child. But a girl—a solemn-eyed, long-banged little girl! He was only forty. His life was full of demands, of interests of the keenest sort, of friends, too, the best in the world. Yet the pleasure that he felt at any expression of affection from Laurel could make his eyes grow misty. And lately—last year, and the year before—a choking wave of pride would sweep over him now and then, as he observed her, or listened to some of her quiet comments.

To hear her exclaim that she loved reading—the sort of reading he had prescribed for her—had obliged him to swallow once or twice before trusting himself to speak. And picture galleries! He had thought her utterly bored by them. She was a polite little creature. She had never said she didn’t like them, but after the first half hour or so in a gallery, she usually made inquiry as to how much longer they were going to stay.

“I didn’t know you liked picture galleries, Laurel,” he said to her later, seated at a little table beside a trickling fountain with goldfish and twinkling lights—blue and pink and yellow—shining in its depths, and tinkling Hawaiian music sounding from somewhere in the distance. “You never said you did.”

“I didn’t know it until lately,” said Laurel. “It came to me all in a flash. You know how liking things does come in a flash sometimes.”

“No. Tell me.”