Until Felix came she had had no other companions, some innate reserve keeping her from romping with the children on the street, her sole diversion, except when playing at home among her father's possessions or making a visit to Kitty, being found in the books of fairy-tales which the old hunchback, Tim Kelsey, had lent her. At first this natural shyness had held her aloof even from O'Day, content only to watch his face as he answered her childish appeals. But before the first week had passed she had slipped her hand into his, and before the month was over her arms were around his neck, her fresh, soft cheek against his own, cuddling close as she poured out her heart in a continuous flow of prattle and laughter, her father looking on in blank amazement. For, while Kling loved her as most fathers love their motherless daughters, Felix had seen at a glance that he was either too engrossed in his business or too dense and unimaginative to understand so winning a child. She was Masie, “dot little girl of mine dot don't got no mudder,” or “Beesvings, who don't never be still,” but that was about as far as his notice of her went, except sending her to school, seeing that she was fed and clothed, and on such state occasions as Christmas, New Year's, or birthdays, giving her meaningless little presents, which, in most instances, were shut up in her bureau drawers, never to be looked at again. Kitty, who remembered the child's mother as a girl with a far-away look in her eyes and a voice of surprising sweetness, always maintained that it was a shame for Kling, who was many years her senior, to have married the girl at all. “Not, John, dear, that Otto isn't a decent man, as far as he goes,” she had once said to him, when the day's work was over and they were discussing their neighbors, “and that honest, too, that he wouldn't get away with a sample trunk weighing a ton if it was nailed fast to the sidewalk, and a good friend of ours who wouldn't go back on us, and never did. But that wife of his, John! If she wasn't as fine as the best of em, then I miss my guess. She got it from that father of hers--the clock-maker that never went out in the daytime, and hid himself in his back shop. There was something I never understood about the two of 'em and his killing himself when he did. Why, look at that little Masie! Can't ye see she is no more Kling's daughter than she is mine? Ye can't hatch out hummin'-birds by sittin' on ducks' eggs, and that's what's the matter over at Otto's.” “Well, whose eggs were they?” John had inquired, half asleep by the stove, his tired legs outstretched, the evening paper dropping from his hand. “Oh, I don't say that they are not Kling's right enough, John. Masie is his child, I know. But what I say is that the mother is stamped all over the darling, and that Otto can't put a finger on any part and call it his own.”