her boldness, tumbled up on the next step. He went forward to catch her.

"Hold up," he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused
and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum. These were, very nearly, the
first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together,
interchanged. Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was
discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the
uneasiness that he felt with children. Little girls (who certainly
looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly;
moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy
with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright
and easy in any society. "Poor old Munty," she would say to her friends,
"it's not all his fault----" It was, as a fact, very largely hers. He had
never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness
slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier
conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom. It had been understood
from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father's world. He
would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at
certain periods, paid bills for her clothes.

"What's a child want with all this?" he had ventured once to say.

"Hardly your business, my dear," his wife had told him. "The child's
clothes are marvellously cheap considering. I don't know how Florice
does it for the money." He resented nothing--it was not his way--but he
did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that
it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his
daughter was praised, that "the kid will grow up with the most
tremendous ideas."