'This is (hiccup) Master Aylwin, Winifred,' he said.
The child looked at me again with the same smile. Her alarm had fled.
'This is my little daughter Winifred,' said Tom, with a pompous bow.
I was astonished. I never knew that Wynne had a daughter, for intimate as he and I had become, he had actually never mentioned his daughter before.
'My only daughter,' Tom repeated.
He then told me, with many hiccups, that, since her mother's death (that is to say from her very infancy), Winifred had been brought up by an aunt in Wales. 'Quite a lady, her aunt is,' said Tom proudly, 'and Winifred has come to spend a few weeks with her father.'
He said this in a grandly paternal tone—a tone that seemed meant to impress upon her how very much obliged she ought to feel to him for consenting to be her father; and, judging from the look the child gave him, she did feel very much obliged.
Suddenly, however, a thought seemed to come back upon Tom, a thought which my unexpected appearance on the scene had driven from his drunken brain. The look of virtuous indignation returned, and staring at the little girl through glazed eyes, he said with the tremulous and tearful voice of a deeply injured parent,
'Winifred, I thought I heard you singing one of them heathen Gypsy songs that you learnt of the Gypsies in Wales.'
'No, father,' said she, 'it was the song they sing in Shire-Carnarvon about the golden cloud over Snowdon and the spirits of the air.'