go and see her father--quite a long journey, through the silent
house, down the long stairs to the dining-room where he sat alone at his
dessert.

Ruth could not remember her mother, and she saw so little of her father
that he seemed almost a stranger to her. He was so wonderfully busy,
and the world he lived in was such a great way off from hers in the
nursery.

In the morning he hurried away just as she was at her breakfast, and all
she knew of him was the resounding slam of the hall door, which came
echoing up the staircase. Very often in the evening he came hastily
into the nursery to say good-bye on his way out to some dinner-party,
and at night she woke up to hear his step on the stairs as he came back
late. But when he dined at home Ruth always went downstairs to dessert.
Then, as she entered the large sombre dining-room, where there were
great oil paintings on the walls and heavy hangings to the windows, and
serious-looking ponderous furniture, her father would look up from his
book, or from papers spread on the table, and nod kindly to her:

"Ah! It's you, Ruth. Quite well, eh? There's a good child. Have an
orange? That's right."

Then he would plunge into his reading again, and Ruth would climb slowly
on to a great mahogany chair placed ready for her, and watch him as she
cut up her orange.

She wondered very much why people wrote him such long, long letters, all
on blue paper and tied up with pink tape. She felt sure they were not
nice letters, for his face always looked worried over them; and when he
had finished he threw them on the floor, as though he were glad. This
made her so curious that she once ventured to ask him what they were.
They were called "briefs", he told her. But she was not much wiser;
for, hearing from Nurse Smith that "brief" was another word for short,
she felt sure there must be some mistake.

Exactly as the clock struck eight Nurse's knock came at the door, Ruth
got down from her chair and said good-night.

Sometimes her father was so deeply engaged in his reading that he stared
at her with a faraway look in his eyes, as if he scarcely knew who she
was. After a minute he said absently: "Bed-time, eh? Good-night.
Good-night, my dear." Sometimes when he was a little less absorbed he
put a sixpence or a shilling into her hand as he kissed her, and added:
"There's something to spend at the toy-shop."

Ruth received these presents without much surprise or joy. She w