Burke was grievously disappointed, ashamed, and angry; and being accustomed always to acting exactly as he felt, he acted now--as he felt. He was grievously disappointed that his brief dream of a daughter in his home should have come to naught. He was ashamed that he should have allowed himself to be deluded into such a dream, and angry that the thing had so stirred him--that he could be so stirred by the failure of so absurd and preposterous a supposition to materialize into fact. As the days passed, matters became worse rather than better. Added to his disappointment and chagrin there came to be an unreasoning wrath that this girl was not his daughter, together with a rebellion at his lonely life, and an overmastering self-pity that he should be so abused of Fate. It was then that he began systematically to avoid, so far as was possible, being with the girl at all, save for the necessary dictation and instructions. This was the more easily accomplished, as the cataloguing now had almost arrived at the stage where it was a mere matter of copying and tabulating the mass of material already carefully numbered to correspond with the equally carefully numbered curios in the cabinets. In spite of it all, however, Burke Denby knew, in his heart, that he was becoming more and more fond of this young girl, more and more interested in her welfare, more and more restless and dissatisfied when not in her presence, more and more poignantly longing to make her his daughter by adoption, now that it was settled beyond question that she was not his by the ties of flesh and blood. Outwardly, however, he remained the stern, unsmiling man, silent, morose, and anything but delightful as a daily companion. To Betty he had become the unsolvable enigma. That this most unhappy change should have been brought about by the breaking of the Venetian Tear Vase, she could not believe--valuable and highly treasured as it was; yet, as she looked back, the change seemed to have dated from the moment of the vase's shattering on the library floor, the day after Christmas. At first she had supposed the man's sudden reversion to gloom and silence was a mere whim of the mind or a passing distemper of the body. But when day after day brought no light to his eye, no smile to his lip, no elasticity to his step, she became seriously disturbed, particularly as she could not help noticing that he no longer worked with her; that he no longer, in fact, seemed to want to remain in the library even to hear her read to him. She was sorely troubled. Not only did she miss the pleasure and stimulus of his presence and interest in the work, but she feared lest in some way she had disappointed or offended him. She began to question herself and to examine critically her work.