She nodded, and her face brightened.
“You love him very much—your father?”
She looked at him wonderingly, as if she had not understood his question, then answered, “Oh yes; I love him very much.”
“And he loves you, too?”
“Well, I should think so.”
Now he also rooted up a sorrel-plant and sighed.
“Why do you sigh?” she asked.
Something was just crossing his mind, he said, and then asked, laughingly, if her father still took her on his knee sometimes, as on the day when he had been in the White House.
She laughed and said she was a big girl now, and he should not ask such silly questions; but afterwards it came out that all the same she still sat on her father’s knee—“Of course, not astride any more!” she added, laughing.
“Yes, that was a nice day,” he said, “and I sat on his other knee. How small we must have been then.”