Once more we were left again together, but Sunbeam’s face by this time matched her name.
She went to the table and began pulling the chairs to their right places. She touched almost every teaspoon and knife with a kind of loving, restless touch, as if she would fain have put some of her own feeling into them; lastly, she got up on a chair and cast a critical eye on the self-made bun.
“Would you leave it?” she inquired of me.
“Why not? Certainly I should.”
“But it’s not quite as pretty as the things mother makes.”
“Well, you could hardly expect that.”
“No. Of course not.”
Then, once having settled that question, she came back to me.
“Have you known father long?” she asked.
“Yes. A very long time in some ways, a very short one in others.”