A paradox, she thought, not to want a thing and yet to be wounded because it was not hers. A ridiculous paradox--and brightly she tried to smile at the silliness of it; blinking the tears that were swelling now, her face turned against the window towards the pavement. A tall, slim girl was passing, holding the arm of a nice-looking little old man with a grey moustache and military air. The tall, slim girl was laughing down at him, and he looked to be chuckling merrily, just as--Her mind swung off, and the tears must be blinked again. They reminded her, those two, of herself and her father. Such familiar friends as they looked so she had been with Dad who idolised her and whom she had idolised. Just like that--arm in arm, joking, “ragging”--she used to walk with him round about the home in Ireland--the world to one another and none else in the world, except the mother who was so intimately and inseparably of them that years past her death they still spoke of her as if she were alive. Thus, long after her death, it would be: “Dad, we can't go home by the hill; mother never lets Grizzle do that climb after a long day.” And: “Mary, your mother won't like you being so late; we must turn back.” And: “Mary, there's the pig by mother's almond tree; run and shoo him.” Partly this refusal to recognise that, though dead, Mother was actually gone from them, no longer was sharing their little jokes and duties, was because death came with such steady, appreciable, unfrightening steps. First the riding stopped, and then the walks made shorter and shorter; then the strolls in the garden stopped, and then carrying the couch out under the trees--and none of them very fearful, because prepared: it was to be--almost the very day could have been named. Thus, when it came, though the blow swooped heavy, terrific, she never seemed actually to have left them. “Well, now, dear dears,” she had said with a little smile and a little sigh, “we have been happy ... only a little way away....” But with Dad it was different. Somehow, looking back on it, one had supposed that nothing would ever touch the cheery little man; that she and he would go on and on and on--well, till they grew very old together. Nothing could ever touch him.... “What a wicked beauty, eh, Mary?” he had said when the man brought round the half-broken filly that its owner “funked.” And she had laughed and said: “Yes, an angel in a temper--what a run you will have, Dad!” and had waved from the gate as the angel in a temper curveted away around the corner. Nothing could ever touch him.... And then the man on a bicycle--with a dent in his hat, she noticed. “If you can come quickly, missy. Top of the Three Finger field he lays.” Bare-backed she had galloped Grizzle there, and as she sped could not for the life of her think of aught else than the dent in the man's hat; rode up Three Finger Lane wondering how it came there; approached the little group wondering why he did not push it out.