“No, thank you,” she whispered.
He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair beside the bed.
“Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?”
And again the pathetic lips just moved.
“You know, Papa.”
There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We can’t let you suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you happy?”
“No. You wouldn’t do the one thing—Papa?”
“I said anything,” he groaned.