“I am very sorry, father. Didn’t you expect me?”
“Yes, but not at that moment, as it happened. You are growing very like your mother, my girl.”
There was a pause, Edna not knowing what to say. Her father seldom spoke of his dead wife, and Edna could not remember her mother.
“Somehow I did not realize until to-night—that you were growing up. You have always been my baby to me. Then—suddenly—you came in. Edna, she was only four years older than you when she died. You see, my dear, although I grow older, she always remains young—but I sometimes think that the young man who was her husband is dead too, for there is not much likeness to him in me.”
Sartwell had been drumming lightly with his fingers on the desk top as he spoke; now he reached up and turned off the electric light as if its brilliancy troubled him. The lamp in the centre of the room was sufficient, and it left him in the shadow.
“I suppose there comes a time in the life of every father, when he learns, with something of a shock, that the little girl who has been playing about his knee is a young woman. It is like when a man hears himself alluded to as old for the first time. I well remember how it made me catch my breath when I first heard myself spoken of as an old man.”
“But you are not old,” cried the girl, with a little indignant half sob in her voice. She wished to go to her father and put her arms around his neck, but she felt intuitively that he desired her to stay where she was until he finished what he had to say.
“I am getting on in that direction. None of us grows younger, but the dead. I suppose a daughter is as blind to her father’s growing old, as he to her advancing womanhood. But we won’t talk of my age. We are welcoming the coming, rather than speeding the going, to-night. You and I, Edna, must realize that we, in a measure, begin life on a new line with each other. We are both grown-up people. When your mother was a little older than you are, I had her portrait painted. She laughed at me and called me extravagant. You see, we were really very poor, and she thought, poor girl, that a portrait of herself was not exactly a necessity. I have thought since that it was the one necessary thing I ever bought. I had it copied, when I got richer, by a noted painter, who did it more as a favour to me than for the money, for painters do not care to copy other men’s work. Curiously enough he made a more striking likeness of her than the original was. Come here, my girl.”
Edna sprang to her father’s side and rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. Sartwell turned on the electric light. At the bottom of the desk lay a large portrait of a most beautiful woman. The light shone down on the face, and the fine eyes looked smilingly up at them.
“That was your mother, Edna,” said the father, almost in a whisper, speaking with difficulty.