how is this, Anna? what has happened to my child? "--and he
pointed to shining drops that glistened on the window-glass.

They must have come from my eyes; I could not deny their authorship, and
so I confessed to tears of gladness at seeing him once more.

He looked fondly down at me through the dim light. I asked him after the
tenant of my premises. He shook his head as one does in great doubt,
said "life was uncertain," and repeated several other axioms, that were
quite apart from his original style, and excessively annoying to me.

"Papa," I said, "why not tell me truly? will this man recover?"

"'Man proposes, God disposes,' my child," he said.

"I don't dispute the general truth," I replied,--"but, particularly, is
this man's life in danger?"

He began to quote somebody's psalm or hymn about "fitful fevers and
fleeting shadows."

My father has a fine, rich, variant power of sound with which to charm
such as have ears to hear, and Anna Percival has been so endowed.
Therefore she listened and waited to the end. When it came, she looked
up into her father's face and said,--

"Papa, I am not a child, to be coaxed into forgetfulness; why will you
not trust me? I am older than Sophie was when you took her in where I
have not been; why will you not make me your friend?"--and some sudden
collision of watery powers among the window-drops, whether from
accretion or otherwise, sent a glistening rivulet down to the barrier of
the sash.

Papa folded his arms, and looked at me. I could not bear to be thus shut
out. I said so.

"Could you bear to be shut in?" he thought, and asked it.

"I think I could. I could bear anything that you gave me; I could keep
anything that you intrusted to my keeping."

Papa looked at me as one does at a cherished vine the outermost edges of
which are just frost-touched; then he folded me to his heart. I felt the
throbbings thereof, and mine began to regret that I had intruded into
the vestibule of his sacred temple; but a certain something went
whispering within me, "You can feed the sacred fire," and I whispered to
the whispering voice, and to my father's ear,--

"You'll take me in, won't you?"

"Come," was the only spoken word.

The room was not cheery; he felt it, and said,--

"You see what the effect is when my Myrtle-Vine is off my walls;" and he
tossed aside books and papers that had evidently been astray for days,
and lay now in his way.

Papa took a key (he wears it too,