"Hold up," he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum. These were, very nearly, the first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together, interchanged. Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the uneasiness that he felt with children. Little girls (who certainly looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly; moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright and easy in any society. "Poor old Munty," she would say to her friends, "it's not all his fault----" It was, as a fact, very largely hers. He had never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom. It had been understood from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father's world. He would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at certain periods, paid bills for her clothes. "What's a child want with all this?" he had ventured once to say. "Hardly your business, my dear," his wife had told him. "The child's clothes are marvellously cheap considering. I don't know how Florice does it for the money." He resented nothing--it was not his way--but he did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his daughter was praised, that "the kid will grow up with the most tremendous ideas." He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father. "She might just want to see me occasionally. But I'd only frighten her, I suppose, if she did." Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in the worth and goodness of no one at all. He had, for a brief wild moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that, "the earlier the better." "My dear," she would say to a chosen friend, "what Munty's like when he's romantic!" She never, after the first month of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him. Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his little daughter tumbling on the stairs. He wondered what had made her do it. He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.