Violet looked up a little shyly, and put her arms round his neck. "And thou art the best father in all the world—dear, dear father."
The old policeman, walking by in the street, saw the little maiden with her arms so tightly clasped round her father's neck; and he said to himself with a groan, "Poor maiden! she knows it all now, and she would fain hold him back if she could;" and he walked on.
But Violet did not know it all, nor for many days did the truth dawn upon her. It fell to Fritz's lot, as usual, to be the one to proclaim the tidings.
It was one evening about a month after war had been proclaimed. It had been a very hot day, and Violet was tired and weak, and not inclined to play or talk. She was leaning back against her pillows looking out at the pigeons, which always came at this hour of a summer's afternoon to sit and preen their feathers on the lantern-chain which hung high up across the street.
She knew these pigeons quite well; she had given them all names. She placed crumbs for them every day on the window-sill beside her chair, and she delighted to see their fussy ways, twirling round and cooing angrily, and trying to push each other off the sill so as to secure the larger share of the food.
But to-day she only watched them languidly. For the last three days neither Fritz nor Ella had called in to play with her. She had seen them in the street hanging on to the backs of the forage-waggons, and Fritz had once appeared in the window opposite with Ella's doll speared at the end of a lance, but seeing Violet beckoning to him to come across, he had shaken his head lugubriously and disappeared from her sight.
So Violet, whose back was aching and whose little heart sank easily under any depressing influence, was alternately watching her father putting some finishing touches to the hood of her new carriage, and gazing out languidly at the pigeons and the storks on the red roofs, and the jackdaw in Fritz's window opposite, hopping everlastingly up and down from its perch, and screaming out some words which the baker's boy had taught it with much trouble to say.
Beyond the roofs and between the fretted spire of the church she saw also the hill, looking so green and fresh in the golden evening air; and above it there was a pale green sky, flecked with amber clouds and little bars of red.
Violet sighed heavily, and John looked up from his work.
"What ails my treasure?"