"Oh, I'm not broke. And"--suddenly serious--"I must tell you something, daddy. I've been waiting for a chance to ask you if you cared; it didn't seem right not to ask you; and, of course, if you mind, I _won't_." He smiled at her earnestness, her unusual indirection. She was immensely grown up; there were new manifestations of her otherwiseness. He noted little sophisticated tricks of manner that reminded him vaguely of some one else. "Amy says it's all right for me to do it, but that I must ask you; and mamma says that, too." Her preluding roused apprehensions. What might not have happened in these weeks that Phil had spent with Lois? He observed his daughter with a new intentness. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and touched it lightly, with an un-Phil-like gesture to her nose; and an instant later, with an almost imperceptible movement of her head, resettled her hat. She had acquired--quite unconsciously he did not question--a new air. She was his old Phil, but the portrait had been retouched here and there, and was reminiscent in unaccountable ways of some one else very like and very different. "Yes, Phil, come out with it," he said, finding her eyes upon him in a wide, unseeing gaze--and that, too, he now remembered. She had taken on, as young girls do, the superficial graces and innocent affectations of an older person. Such perfectly natural and pardonable imitation is induced by admiration; and Lois had been a woman of fascinations in old times! He had no reason for believing that she had changed; and it had been clear to him that first day of Lois's return that she had laid strong hold upon Phil's imagination. "Mamma wants to give me some money: she has already done some nice things for me. She bought this hat and suit; but she wants to do more." Kirkwood frowned. Lois had no right to come back and steal Phil away from him. He was at once jealous, suspicious. He, too, had assumed that Lois's return had not been voluntary; that she had come back of necessity and flung herself upon Amzi's charity. It would be quite like her to try to tempt Phil with a handful of trinkets. "It isn't likely that she has much to give you; but before you accept anything of importance you should be sure that it's a proper gift for her to offer, that she can afford to do it." "There doesn't seem to be any question about that, daddy. What she wants to do is to give me a whole lot of money--enough to make me really rich. She wants to put one hundred thousand dollars in a trusteeship for me." There was consternation in his quick glance. Nothing in his knowledge of Lois justified a belief that she would ever, by any proper and reputable means, command any such sum. "You must be mistaken, Phil. You must have got the figures wrong. It's more likely a thousand. You know mathematics was never a strong point with you!"