reaking off, "you must have found
yourself in very strange and disappointing company last night. I was very
sorry for you, and sorry for myself, too. All the evening I was saying to
myself, 'I wonder what my little girl is thinking of me.' But I couldn't
help it. I had not the time to explain. I had to sit quiet, knowing that
you must be unhappy, certain that you must be despising me for the
company I kept."

Sylvia blushed guiltily.

"Despising you? No, father," she said, in a voice of apology. "I saw how
much above the rest you were."

"Blaming me, then," interrupted Garratt Skinner, with an easy smile. He
was not at all offended. "Let us say blaming me. And it was quite natural
that you should, judging by the surface. And there was nothing but the
surface for you to judge by."

While in this way defending Sylvia against her own self-reproach, he only
succeeded in making her feel still more that she had judged hastily where
she should have held all judgment in abeyance, that she had lacked faith
where by right she should have shown most faith. But he wished to spare
her from confusion.

"I was so proud of you that I could not but suffer all the more. However,
don't let us talk of it, my dear"; and waving with a gesture of the hand
that little misunderstanding away forever, he resumed:

"Well, I am rather fond of Wallie Hine. I don't know why, perhaps because
he is so helpless, because he so much stands in need of a steady mentor
at his elbow. There is, after all, no accounting for one's likings. Logic
and reason have little to do with them. As a woman you know that. And
being rather fond of Wallie Hine, I have tried to do my best for him. It
would not have been of any use to shut my door on Barstow and Archie
Parminter. They have much too firm a hold on the poor youth. I should
have been shutting it on Wallie Hine, too. No, the only plan was to
welcome them all, to play Parminter's game of showing the youth about
town, and Barstow's game of crude flattery, and gradually, if possible,
to dissociate him from his companions, before they had fleeced him
altogether. So you were let in, my dear, for that unfortunate evening. Of
course I was quite sure that you would not attribute to me designs upon
Wallie Hine, otherwise I should have turned them all out at once."

He spoke with a laugh, putting aside, as it were, a quite incredible
suggestion. But he looked at her sharply as he laughed. Sylvia's face
grew crimson,