'Can't see why you should,' he said. 'I don't like you to worry, Amelie. What's it all about?'
He paused a moment.
'Have you heard anything about Bertie which bothers you?' he asked; 'or hasn't he been good to you?'
She did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized frame of mind, it seemed to her that her father's first question was not vague or general, but that he had some special, definite reason for asking. From that it was but the shortest of links necessary to couple the question with that which grew mushroom-like in the shadow of her mind.
'No; he has been perfectly good to me, and I have heard nothing that bothers me,' she said.
She looked up at her father as she spoke. He was standing close to her—a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. In his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. Even now, as she knew—for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch—there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers to move the world 'as he chose. But he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she-might feel—just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift.
'We have always been chums, Amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. 'When you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. I used to be pretty smart at it; I used to be devilish proud of the way I could take the frown out of your little forehead.'
She held out her hand to him.
'You are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. 'But I tell you this truth: it is only I who have been worrying. I have been imagining all sorts of things, so that I have got to believe them. That is the matter with me.'
'You have heard nothing specific?' he asked.