"I didn't—just know—whether you'd want me to put it down," she said.
"You've come home, haven't you?" questioned the man. "Home is supposed to be where your father is, isn't it?"
"It never has been," said the girl quite simply.
Like a clash of swords the man's eyes smote across the girl's 4 and the girl's across the man's. The ironic grin was still twisting wryly at one corner of the man's mouth but under the mocking fend of his narrowing eye lids a glisten of tears showed suddenly.
"Oh—Father," rallied the girl. "They called me an evil name! They——" With a gesture of ultimate bewilderment and despair she took a single step towards him. "Oh, Father," she gasped. "What is it about boys that makes it so wicked to have them around?" And pitched over headlong in a dead faint at his feet.
When blackness turned into whiteness again she found herself lying limply in the big Oxford chair before the fire with a slate-colored hound sniffing rather interrogatively at her finger-tips and the strange man whom she had called "father" leaning casually with one elbow on the mantel-piece while he stood staring down at her through a great, sweet, foggy blur of cigarette smoke.
"Wh—what is the blue dog's name?" she asked a bit vaguely.
"Creep-Mouse," said the man.
"I'm—I'm glad there's a dog," she whispered. 5
"So it's all right now, is it?" smiled the man. The smile was all in his eyes now and frankly mechanical still—a faint flare of mirth through a quizzical fretwork of pain.