"Don't I, my daughter? don't I know how I love you?" And his eyes turned with yearning affection upon her face, then back to that of the little one. "Six weeks old to-day, and a very cherub for beauty. Aunt Chloe tells me she is precisely my daughter over again, and I feel as if I had now an opportunity to recover what I lost in not having my first-born with me from her birth. Little Elsie, grandpa feels that you are his; his precious treasure." The young mother's eyes grew misty with a strange mixture of emotion, in which love and joy were the deepest and strongest. Her arm stole round her father's neck. "Dear papa, how nice of you to love her so; my precious darling. She is yours, too, almost as much as Edward's and mine. And I am sure if we should be taken away and you and she be left, you would be the the same good father to her you have been to me." "Much better, I hope. My dear daughter, I was far too hard with you at times. But I know you have forgiven it all long ago." "Papa, dear papa, please don't ever again talk of--of forgiveness from me; I was your own, and I believe you always did what you thought was for my good; and oh, what you have been, and are to me, no tongue can tell." "Or you to me, my own beloved child," he answered with emotion. The babe stirred, and opened its eyes with a little, "Coo, coo." "Let me take her," said Mr. Dinsmore, turning back the cover and gently lifting her from her cozy nest. Elsie lay back among her cushions again, watching with delighted eyes as her father held and handled the wee body as deftly as the most competent child's nurse. It was a very beautiful babe; the complexion soft, smooth, and very fair, with a faint pink tinge; the little, finely formed head covered with rings of golden hair that would some day change to the darker shade of her mother's, whose regular features and large, soft brown eyes she inherited also. "Sweet little flower blossomed into this world of sin and sorrow! Elsie, dearest, remember that she is not absolutely yours, her father's, or mine; but only lent you a little while to be trained up for the Lord." "Yes, papa, I know," she answered with emotion, "and I gave her to Him even before her birth." "I hope she will prove as like you in temper and disposition as she bids fair to be in looks." "Papa, I should like her to be much better than I was." He shook his head with a half-incredulous smile. "That could hardly be, if she has any human nature at all." "Ah, papa, you forget how often I used to be naughty and disobedient; how often you had to punish me; particularly in that first year after you returned from Europe." A look of pain crossed his features. "Daughter, dear, I am full of remorse when I think of that time. I fully deserved the epithet Travilla once bestowed upon me in his righteous indignation at my cruelty to my gentle, sensitive little girl." "What was that, papa?" she asked, with a look of wonder and surprise. "Dinsmore, you're a brute!"