“There now, isn’t that better?” she said, smiling brightly.
“That’s just what your home-coming has done for me,” he said gratefully—“let in the sunlight.”
“Come, come—don’t try to turn the head of your offspring with flattery! Now, sir, sit down,” and she pointed to a chair at his desk, which stood within the bay window.
“First,”—with his gentle smile—“if I may, I’d like to take a look at my daughter.”
“I suppose a father’s wish is a daughter’s command,” she complained. “So go ahead.”
He moved to the window, so that the light fell full upon her, and for a long moment gazed into her face. The brow was low and broad. Over the white temples the heavy dark hair waved softly down, to be fastened in a simple knot low upon the neck, showing in its full beauty the rare modelling of her head. The eyes were a rich, warm, luminous brown, fringed with long lashes, and in them lurked all manner of fathomless mysteries. The mouth was soft, yet full and firm—a real mouth, such as Nature bestows upon her real women. It was a face of freshness and youth and humour, and now was tremulous with a smiling, tear-wet tenderness.
“I think,” said her father, slowly and softly, “that my daughter is very beautiful.”
“There—enough of your blarney!” She flushed with pleasure, and pressed her fresh cheek against his withered one. “You dear old father, you!”
She drew him to his desk, which was strewn with a half-finished manuscript on the typhoid bacillus, and upon which stood a faded photograph of a young woman, near Katherine’s years and made in her image, dressed in the tight-fitting “basque” of the early eighties. Westville knew that Doctor West had loved his wife dearly, but the town had never surmised a tenth of the grief that had closed darkly in upon him when typhoid fever had carried her away while her young womanhood was in its freshest bloom.