The girl was crying softly, trying not to let her father know it. Her hand stole from the shoulder next her to the other, his hand caressed her fair hair.
“Poor father!” she said, trying to speak bravely.
“How lonely you must have been. I seem to—to understand things—that I didn’t before—as if I had suddenly grown old.”
They looked at the picture for some time together in silence, then she said:
“Why did you never show me the portrait before?”
“Well, my dear, it was here and not at the house, and when you were a small girl, you did not come to the office, you know. Then, you see, your stepmother had the responsibility of bringing you up—and—and—somehow I thought it wouldn’t be giving her a fair chance. The world is rather hard on stepmothers.” He hurriedly closed the desk. “Come, come,” he cried, brusquely, “this won’t do, you know, Edna. But this is what I want to say. I want you to remember—to understand rather—that you and I are, as it were, alone in the world; there is a bond between us in that, as well as in the fact that we are father and daughter. I want you always to feel that I am your best friend, and there must never come any misunderstanding between us.”
“There never could, father,” said the girl, solemnly.
“That’s right, that’s right. Now if anything should happen to trouble you, I want you to come to me and tell me all about it. I wish there to be complete confidence between us. If anything perplexes you, tell me; if it is trivial I want to know, and if it is serious I want to know. Sometimes an apparently trivial problem is really a serious one, and vice-versa; and remember, it is almost as important to classify your problem as to solve it. That’s where I can help you; for even if I could not disentangle the skein, I could perhaps show you that it was not worth unravelling.”
The girl regarded her father earnestly while he spoke, and then, as if to show that woman’s intuition will touch the spot around which a man’s reason is elaborately circling, she startled him by saying:
“Father, something has happened concerning me, that has made you anxious on my account. What is it? I think I should know. Has my step-mother been saying——”