Margaret was sorry to say good-bye to Miss More and little Ida when
the voyage was over, three days later. She was instinctively fond of
children, as all healthy women are, and she saw very few of them in
her wandering life. It is true that she did not understand them very
well, for she had been an only child, brought up much alone, and
children's ways are only to be learnt and understood by experience,
since all children are experimentalists in life, and what often seems
to us foolishness in them is practical wisdom of the explorative kind.

When Ida had pulled Margaret away from the railing after watching Mr.
Van Torp while he was talking to himself, the singer had thought
very little of it; and Ida never mentioned it afterwards. As for the
millionaire, he was hardly seen again, and he made no attempt to
persuade Margaret to take another walk with him on deck.

'Perhaps you would like to see my place,' he said, as he bade her
good-bye on the tender at Liverpool. 'It used to be called Oxley
Paddox, but I didn't like that, so I changed the name to Torp Towers.
I'm Mr. Van Torp of Torp Towers. Sounds well, don't it?'

'Yes,' Margaret answered, biting her lip, for she wanted to laugh. 'It
has a very lordly sound. If you bought a moor and a river in Scotland,
you might call yourself the M'Torp of Glen Torp, in the same way.'

'I see you're laughing at me,' said the millionaire, with a quiet
smile of a man either above or beyond ridicule. 'But it's all a game
in a toy-shop anyway, this having a place in Europe. I buy a doll to
play with when I have time, and I can call it what I please, and
smash its head when I'm tired of it. It's my doll. It isn't any one's