I did not intend to punish you so severely, and should not have kept you there more than half an hour, at the _very longest_; but company came in, and I quite forgot you." While speaking thus he had led her up to the fire and sat down with her on his knee.

"My poor darling!" he said, "these little hands are very cold, let papa rub them; and are your feet cold too ?" "Yes sir," she replied, and he pulled off her shoes and stockings, and moving his chair closer to the fire, held her feet out toward the blaze, and rubbed them in his warm hands.
"You have been crying a good deal," he said, looking keenly into her face.
"Yes, papa," she replied, dropping her face on his breast and bursting into tears; "I thought you were going to leave me there all night." "Did you?
and were you afraid ?" "No, papa, not _afraid_, because I know you would be sleeping in the next room; and besides, God could take care of me as well in the closet as anywhere else.

Is it getting night, papa, or morning ?" "It is beginning to grow dark," he said.

"But tell me why you cried, if you were not afraid." "Partly because I was uncomfortable, papa, but more because I was sorry I had been naughty, and displeased you, and afraid that I can never learn to be good." "It is very strange," he remarked, "that you cannot learn not to ask to do what I have forbidden.

I shall have to punish you every time you do it; for you _must_ learn that no _means no_, and that you are never to coax or tease after papa has once said it.