"I did not answer, but sat looking down on the smooth peachy cheek that one of my hands would keep stroking, and at the long yellow hair that hung down over the shoulders in waves, and, in spite of myself, a sigh escaped my lips. "Ruth--Cobweb, as I always called her, because she was so soft and downy--started up, gazing earnestly in my face, and then kissed me very, very fondly. "`Don't think about the past, dear father,' she said softly--she always called me father when she was serious. "`Can't help it, child,' I said mournfully; and then, seeing the tears gather in her eyes, I tried to be cheerful, and smiled as I added, `I have the future as well as the past to make me sad, my dear.' "She looked at me wonderingly, but did not speak, and I sat there holding her little hand to my heart as I thought of the past, and how ten years before, just as business was beginning to prosper with me, I was left alone with a little fair-haired girl of eight, who found it so hard to believe that her mother had been taken away never to return, only to live in our memories. And I thought, too, of how the years had fled away, and I had become a wealthy man, whose sole thought had been of the child I had seen grow up to maidenhood, making a very idol of her, yielding to her every whim, and doing the most I could to spoil one who never would be spoiled. For, with all the accomplishments I had lavished upon her, Ruth had grown up to be a notable little housewife, who disgusted our cooks by insisting upon going down into the kitchen and making my favourite puddings and tarts with her own hands, and generally behaving in what the servants called an unladylike way. "And then I thought of my other sorrow--the future--and pictured, with an agony I cannot describe, the day when I should have to resign my claims to another, and be left alone, a desolate, broken old man. "I am naturally a very common, hard, and businesslike fellow, and terribly selfish. Cobweb had woven herself so round my heart, that in my peevish, irritable way, I was never happy when home from the City without she was waiting on me--filling my pipe, mixing my one nightly glass of grog, upon which the butler frowned--in fact, he had once suggested to me that his late master of an evening always took port. "Cobweb was very quiet as she glided down from my knee to her hassock at my feet, and was evidently thinking as much as I; and at last I brightened up, for a thought had come to me with a selfish kind of comfort. "`She'll be quite away from all temptations to leave me, there, anyhow,' I said to myself, as I thought of the `at-homes' and halls to which she was so often receiving invitations. "This set me talking--fishing, as I called it in my great cunning--to see if there were one of the rocks ahead of which I was in dread. "`How shall you be able to leave all your fine friends--parties--and set-outs?' I said. "`Oh, I'm tired of them all!' she said clapping her hands.