She was silent.

Her eyes were lowered, and she played idly with her painted fan.
"I wonder if it would surprise you," he went on, "to know that I have made an ideal of _you_ ?" She looked up with a smile.
"Really?
Have you?
I'm afraid I shall prove a disappointment!" He did not answer by the obvious compliment which she felt she had a right to expect.

He kept his gaze fixed steadily on her face, and his shaggy eyebrows almost met in the deep hollow which painful thought had ploughed along his forehead.
"I have made," he said, "an ideal in my mind of the little child who sat on my knee, played with my watch-chain and laughed at me when I called her my little sweetheart.

She was perfectly candid in her laughter,--she knew it was absurd for an old man to have a child as his sweetheart.

I loved to hear her laugh so,--because she was true to herself, and to her right and natural instincts.