Margot looked solemnly puzzled for a moment, and then laughed, deciding boldly that this was a new and elaborate game--a joke, perhaps--which she was too little to understand, but which politeness and good-fellowship alike required her at least to appear to appreciate. They were great friends already, these two. Children always recognised an ally in the man who made so few friends among his peers, and for children--especially for pretty children of a prettiness which accorded with his own private views--Rainham had an undeniable weakness. On slack days--and they were always slack now--loungers about the precincts of the dock often caught a glimpse of the child's fair hair above the low level of the dark bow-window which leaned outwards from Rainham's room; and the foreman had even gone so far as to suggest that his master was bringing her up to the business. "Pays us for looking after her," he confided to his wife, "and looks after her himself!" Mrs. Bullen laughed and then sighed, being a soft-hearted woman, and inclined to grieve over their impending desertion of their unbusinesslike master. "Mr. Philip couldn't do more for her if he was her own father," she acknowledged appreciatively. Whereat Bullen had smiled with the superior air of one who knew--of one who had been down to the sea in ships, and was versed in the mysteries of the great world, of fathers and of children. "Right you are, old woman," he chuckled, "no more he could. Blessed if he could! And there's no mistake about that. And when you and me go North in the spring, why, it strikes me that we shall have to leave missie behind. Yes, that we shall: though I'd take her, glad enough, without the money." If at first his association with Margot reminded Rainham of another little girl whom he had loved, and whose place she could never even approximately fill, the memory was not a bitter one, and he was soon able to listen to her childish questioning without more than a gentle pang. In time, he even found a dreary transient pleasure in closing his eyes on the dank dun reality of Blackpool, while the child discoursed to her doll in the nook of the bow-window, and his fancy wandered in another sunnier, larger room, with open windows, and the hum of a softer language rising in frequent snatches from the steep street outside; with a faint perfume of wood fires in the balmy, shimmering air, a merry clatter and jingle of hoofs, and bells, and harness; and another daintier child voice ringing quaint, colloquial Italian in his ears. The awakening was certainly cruel, sometimes with almost the shock of a sudden savage blow, but the dream lasted and recurred: he had always been a dreamer, and every day found him more forgetful of the present, more familiar with the past.