But this touch had the same effect upon Lilias that her own kiss had on Mary. She cried and sobbed and did her best to swallow it down. “Oh Mr. Geoff! I want papa!” she cried, with that little convulsive break in her voice which is so pitiful in a child. She was seated on Mary’s chair at the door of the hall, and he on the threshold at her feet. Geoff did not know what kind of half-admiring, half-pitying sentiment he had for this child. He could not admire her enough, or wonder at her. She was but a child, not equal to him in his young manhood; and yet that very childhood in its unconsciousness was worlds above him, he thought. He felt like the man in the story who loved the fairy maiden--the young Immortal; would she give up her visionary paradise for his sake and learn to look at him, not as an angel but as a woman? but for that she must be a woman first, and at present she was but a child. When he kissed her hand it cost Lilias no blush. She accepted it with childish, angelical dignity. “She took the kiss sedately--” and the dark fountains of her eyes filled full, and two great tears tumbled over, and a piteous quiver came to her lips, and she said, “Oh, Mr. Geoff, I want papa!” This was when the Squire had been ill about a week, six or seven days before Randolph took Nello away. Geoff went home riding, very full of thought. What could he do to please his little Lily? He preferred that she should creep close to himself and tell him her troubles, but he could not resist that plaint, and even though it should be against himself he must try what he could do to bring her father to her. Geoff thought a great deal on this subject, but it was very fatiguing and unsatisfactory, for he did not know what to do, and after a while he relapsed into the pleasanter path, and began to think of Lily. “Because of the angels,” he said to himself as he jogged softly along, much more slowly and reflectively than his horse liked to go. He forgot where he was going and the engagements he had, and everything that was practical and important, as he rambled on. The day was sweet in early autumn, the lake rippling musically upon the beach, the sky blue and crossed by floating atoms of snowy cloud. Everything in the world was sweet and pleasant to the young man. “Because of the angels;” he had never been quite clear what these words meant, but he seemed to see quite plainly now, though he could no more have explained than he could have written _Hamlet_. “Because of the angels!” He seemed to make a little song of it as he went on, a drowsy, delicious burden like the humming of the bee. It was not he that said it, he thought, but it murmured all about him, wrapping him in a soft enchantment. Such a visionary love as his, perhaps, has need of those intoxications of ethereal fancy: for nothing can be so like the love of an angel as that of a young man possessed by a tender visionary passion for a child.