“You minx!” he suddenly exclaimed, advancing into the room, “what are you doing here and who are you, hey?”
Oliver colored painfully, and looked about for some safe hiding-place, while Mildred, poising her head a little on one side, unflinchingly replied:
“I am Mildred. Who be you?”
“Did I ever hear such impudence?” muttered the Judge, and striding up to the child, he continued, in his loudest tones, “Who in thunder do you think I am?”
Very calmly Mildred looked him in the face and deliberately replied:
“I think you are my father; anyway, I’ve come up to ask if you ain’t.”
“Great Heavens!” and the Judge involuntarily raised his hand to smite the audacious Mildred, but before the blow descended his eyes met those of Richard, and though it was a picture he looked at, there was something in that picture which stayed the act, and his hand came down very gently upon the soft brown hair of the child who was so like both son and daughter.
“Say,” persisted Mildred, emboldened by this very perceptible change in his demeanor, “be you my father, and if you ain’t, who is? Is he?” And she pointed toward Richard, whose mild, dark eyes seemed to Oliver to smile approvingly upon her.
Never before in his life had the Judge been so uncertain as to whether it were proper to scold or to laugh. The idea of that little girl’s coming up to Beechwood, and claiming him for her father was perfectly preposterous, and yet in spite of himself there was about her something he could not resist,—she seemed near to him,—so near that for one brief instant the thought flitted across his brain that he would keep her there with him, and not let her go back to the gable-roof where rumor said she was far from being happy. Then as he remembered all that had been said, and how his adopting her would give rise to greater scandal, he steeled his heart against her and replied, in answer to her questions, “You haven’t any father, and never had. Your mother was a good-for-nothing jade from Maine, who left you here because she knew I had money, and she thought maybe I’d keep you and make you my heir. But she was grandly mistaken. I sent you off then and I’ll send you off again, so begone you baggage, and don’t you let me catch you stealing any more flowers, or calling me names, either, such as ‘old cross-patch.’ I ain’t deaf; I heard you.”
“You called me names first, and you are a heap older than I am,” Mildred answered, moving reluctantly toward the door, and coming to a firm stand as she reached the threshold.