predicament.

"What would you do, my child, if you had--had missed your--your
father?"

Wasn't it clumsy of him? He wanted to break it to me gently, and
this was the best he could do.

"What would I do?" I gasped indignantly. "Why, daddy, imagine
me alone, and--and without money! Why--why, how can you--"

"There! there!" he said, patting me soothingly on the shoulder.

That baby of a Bishop! The very thought of Nancy Olden out alone
in the streets was too much for him.

He had put his free hand into his pocket and had just taken out a
bill and was trying to plan a way to offer it to me and reveal
the fact to poor, modest little Nance Olden that he was not her
own daddy, when an awful thing happened.

We had got up street as far as the opera-house, when we were
caught in the jam of carriages in front; the last afternoon opera
of the season was just over. I was so busy thinking what would be
my next move that I didn't notice much outside--and I didn't want
to move, Tom, not a bit. Playing the Bishop's daughter in a
trailing coat of red, trimmed with chinchilla, is just your
Nancy's graft. But the dear little Bishop gave a jump that almost
knocked the roof off the carriage, pulled his arm from behind me
and dropped the ten-dollar bill he held as though it burned him.