“Forgive you, my darling! Forgive you for what?”
“I’ve been—reading the paper.”
He drew her to his knee.
“What crime is there in reading the paper, sweet one?”
“I mean that horrid inquest, father dear.”
“Oh!”
The smiling wonder left his face. Elsie looked up timidly.
“I ought to have asked your permission,” she said, “but you were away, and auntie has a headache, and Miss Holland (her governess) has gone on her holidays, and I was so curious to know what all the bother was about.”
Yet he did not answer. Hitherto his daughter, his one cherished possession, had been kept sedulously from knowledge of the external world. But she was shooting up, slender and straight, the image of her dead mother. Soon she would be a woman, and it was no part of his theory of life that a girl should be plunged into the jungle of adult existence without a reasonable consciousness of its snares and pitfalls. So ideal were the relations of father and daughter that the vicar had deferred the day of enlightenment. It had come sooner than he counted on.
Elsie was frightened now. Her tears ceased and the flush left her cheeks.