I had stood regarding her for a moment. She turned and saw me, and came forward with her usual morning greeting.
"I beg your pardon, papa: I thought it was Walter."
"I am glad to see a smile on your face, my love."
"Don't think me very disagreeable, papa. I know I am a trouble to you. But I am a trouble to myself first. I fear I have a discontented mind and a complaining temper. But I do try, and I will try hard to overcome it."
"It will not get the better of you, so long as you do the duty of the moment. But I think, as I told you before, that you are not very well, and that your indisposition is going to do you good by making you think about some things you are ready to think about, but which you might have banished if you had been in good health and spirits. You are feeling as you never felt before, that you need a presence in your soul of which at least you haven't enough yet. But I preached quite enough to you yesterday, and I won't go on the same way to-day again. Only I wanted to comfort you. Come and give me my breakfast."
"You do comfort me, papa," she answered, approaching the table. "I know I don't show what I feel as I ought, but you do comfort me much. Don't you like a day like this, papa?"
"I do, my dear. I always did. And I think you take after me in that, as you do in a good many things besides. That is how I understand you so well."
"Do I really take after you, papa? Are you sure that you understand me so well?" she asked, brightening up.
"I know I do," I returned, replying to her last question.
"Better than I do myself?" she asked with an arch smile.
"Considerably, if I mistake not," I answered.
"How delightful! To think that I am understood even when I don't understand myself!"
"But even if I am wrong, you are yet understood. The blessedness of life is that we can hide nothing from God. If we could hide anything from God, that hidden thing would by and by turn into a terrible disease. It is the sight of God that keeps and makes things clean. But as we are both, by mutual confession, fond of this kind of weather, what do you say to going out with me? I have to visit a sick woman."
"No, my dear. I did not hear she was ill."
"O, I daresay it is nothing much. Only old nursey said yesterday she was in bed with a bad cold, or something of that sort."