Her love--thus dammed up into a small space--at last burst its banks, and overflowed on her father.

It was a rich reward to him for all his care of her, and he took delight--perhaps a selfish delight--in all the many pretty ways she perpetually found of convincing him, if he had needed conviction, that he was ever the first object with her.

The nurse told him that half an hour or so before the earliest time at which he could be expected home in the evenings, Miss Ellinor began to fold up her doll's things and lull the inanimate treasure to sleep.

Then she would sit and listen with an intensity of attention for his footstep.

Once the nurse had expressed some wonder at the distance at which Ellinor could hear her father's approach, saying that she had listened and could not hear a sound, to which Ellinor had replied: "Of course you cannot; he is not your papa!" Then, when he went away in the morning, after he had kissed her, Ellinor would run to a certain window from which she could watch him up the lane, now hidden behind a hedge, now reappearing through an open space, again out of sight, till he reached a great old beech-tree, where for an instant more she saw him.