“You are looking forward to a great deal of pleasure in entertaining your young friends next week?”
“Yes, papa; and that makes me glad; but that isn’t all, you know.” And she looked up into his face with an arch, loving smile.
“What else?” he asked, returning the smile with one full of fatherly affection.
“Oh a great many things, papa; but most of all, that you don’t have to go away and leave us any more; that makes this the very happiest winter of our lives so far, Maxie and Gracie and I all think.”
“You may safely put my name into that list also,” he said.
“You’d rather be with us than on your ship?”
“Much rather, daughter. I greatly enjoy these walks with you, as well as many another pleasure belonging to life at home with wife and children.”
“Papa, why did you forbid me to take walks by myself?” asked Lulu presently.
“Wait a moment,” he said, and just then a turn in the road brought them face to face with a ragged, dirty man of aspect so forbidding that Lulu, though not usually a timid child, clung to her father’s hand and shrank half behind him in terror.
The tramp noted it with a scowl, pushed rudely by them and disappeared round the corner.