"Why certainly, daddy, anything in reason, and I know you would not ask anything out of it."
"Sylvia, I want you to promise me never to call me daddy again, either in private, as here between ourselves, or before others."
She looked up at him, her eyes wide with astonishment.
"Why," she exclaimed, "I've called you that ever since you found me a little, little girl alone in the mountains."
"I know it, but it's time to stop. I'm no blood kin to you at all. And I'm not so ancient. The history of the West didn't begin with me."
The wonder in her eyes deepened, and the "King" felt apprehensive, though he stood to his guns. But when she laughed, a joyous, spontaneous laugh, he felt hurt.
"I'll make you the promise readily enough," she said, "but I can't keep it; I really can't. I'll try awful hard, but I'm so used to daddy that it will be sure to pop out just when I'm expecting it least."
The "King" looked at her moodily, not sure whether she was laughing at him or at her own perplexity.
"Then you just try," he said, at last, yielding to a mood of compromise, and stalked abruptly out of the drawing-room.
Sylvia, watching him, saw how stiffly and squarely he held his shoulders, and what long and abrupt strides he took, and her mood of merriment was suddenly succeeded by one of sadness mingled just a little with apprehension. She spoke twice under her breath, and the two brief sentences varied by only a single word. The first was "Dear old daddy!" and the second was "Poor old daddy!"