"Papa," she cried suddenly, as they sat listlessly trifling with some strawberries after the table had been cleared, "let us spend the evening in your painting-room. I know it is your pet retreat, and I want to be a dutiful daughter for once in my life." She crept behind the painter's chair, encircled his head with her arms, and kissed him on the forehead. So had his young wife stolen behind him sometimes, to administer consolation, during those dreary days in Buckingham Street, when he had seated himself before his easel to stare blankly at his hopeless work, prostrate in body and mind. His daughter's touch recalled those departed days with all their mournful associations. He took one of the little caressing hands, and pressed it gently to his lips. "My darling," he said very softly, "you remind me of your mother." It was the first time he had ever said this in all his intercourse with his daughter. They went together to the painting-room, and sat in the great bay-window, through which the soft evening air crept towards them, like a soothing influence. The painter sat in his favourite easy-chair, looking dreamily towards the western sunlight, warm and golden behind a foreground of sombre green. Flo brought a low ottoman to her father's feet and seated herself upon it, with her folded arms resting on his knee, and her head drooping a little upon those round white arms. Not very far away from them, rapid broughams were hurrying to and fro in the shadowy park, bearing airily-attired beauty to the elegant solemnity of patrician dinner-tables, but in the painter's garden the faint sighing of summer winds among the leaves and the twitter of one belated bird alone broke the stillness. Within the twilit painting-room neither William Crawford nor his daughter seemed inclined to break the spell of that summer silence. Amid the brightest and happiest surroundings there is always some touch of melancholy in the atmosphere of a summer evening, and to-night Florence Crawford was not especially happy. "Papa," she said at last, after they had both abandoned themselves for some time to a thoughtful silence, "if I were going to live with you two more years, I think I should be a very different kind of daughter from the creature I have been." She laid a contemptuous emphasis on the word creature, as in the extremity of self-humiliation. "But why, why, darling?" She did not reply to his question, but went on with her self-upbraiding.