"Mary said you wished to speak to me," said the young girl, after a short pause. "I thought I would step in to see you before going to Mr. Sprague's." "To Sprague's?" inquired Murdock, fixing his keen eyes upon the young girl. "Ah, yes; I remember he spoke of the appointment last night. How is the portrait coming on?" "It is almost finished. Probably only one or two more sittings, at the most, will be necessary." Agnes seemed slightly embarrassed by the fixity of her father's searching glance. She settled herself in an armchair and assumed a look of deferent expectancy. Not a word of affection had passed between father and daughter; not a caress had been interchanged. The relations between this impassive man and his charming daughter were those of well-bred, if somewhat distant, relatives. On the one hand, there was the uniform courtesy of the man of the world toward a woman; on the other, the deference of a young girl of good breeding toward a person much older than herself. But the note of cordial and intimate affection between father and child was absolutely missing. And yet Agnes Murdock was naturally of an affectionate and expansive nature. During her mother's lifetime the two women had been inseparable companions, united by a strong bond of sympathy. Mrs. Murdock had been an invalid for many years before her death, and with Agnes had lived either abroad or in the South during much of the time in order to escape the rigors of the northern climate. Thus the father, engrossed as he was with his occupations and his scientific researches, had seen but little of his daughter during her childhood, and had been looked upon by the child almost as a stranger. When at last, after her mother's death, Agnes, heartbroken at the loss of her only friend, returned to the paternal roof, she was a girl of sixteen. In the first loneliness of her bereavement, when, hungering for human sympathy and consolation, she turned to her father, she received patient and courteous attention, with an offer of all the material comforts and luxuries which wealth could procure; but she failed to find the only thing she needed--a responsive human heart.