This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it with the exact truth. "No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever about it." I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show of having to collect himself before he went on. "Then you think my daughter is with her?" "I didn't say that. I don't know anything about it." "March," he urged, "don't _you_ think I have a right to see my daughter?" "That's something I can't enter into, Tedham." "Good God!" said the man. "If you were in my place, wouldn't you want to see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I have got left in the world." I did indeed remember Tedham's affection for his daughter, whom I remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning for the child's mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up. Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light, and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved hand with a gay laugh. "I should think you would be afraid of such a fiery sorrel dragon as that," I said, in recognition of the colt's lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked. "Oh, I'm not afraid with papa!" she said, and she laughed again as he took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight. I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation of the case which pleased me, "If there is anything in the world that Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after a good horse with that little girl of his." "Yes," said my wife, "but a good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with it." "That is so," I assented, "but Tedham has made a lot lately in real estate, they say, and I don't know what better he could do with his money; or, I don't believe _he_ does." We said no more, but we both felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist. "Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn't tell you where she is."