Ogilvie stepped softly across the room, and drew up the blind. The moonlight now came in, and shed a silver bar of light across the child’s bed. Sibyl lay with her golden hair half covering the pillow, her hands and arms flung outside the bedclothes.
“Good-night, little darling,” said her father. He bent over her, and pressed a light kiss upon her cheek. Feather touch as it was, it aroused the child. She opened her big blue eyes.
“Oh, father, is that you?” she cried in a voice of rapture.
“Yes, it is I. I came to wish you good-night.”
“You are good, you never forget,” said Sibyl. She clasped her arms round his neck. “I went to bed without saying my prayers. May I say them now to you?”
“Not for worlds,” it was the man’s first impulse to remark, but he checked himself. “Of course, dear,” he said.
Sibyl raised herself to a kneeling posture. She clasped her soft arms round her father’s neck.
“Pray God forgive me for being naughty to-day,” she began, “and pray God make me better to-morrow, ’cos it will please my darlingest father and mother; and I thank you, God, so much for making them good, very good, and without sin. Pray God forgive Sibyl, and try to make her better.
“Now, father, you’re pleased,” continued the little girl. “It was very hard to say that, because really, truly, I don’t want to be better, but I’ll try hard if it pleases you.”