daughter before.

'My _only_ daughter,' Tom repeated.

He then told me, with many hiccups, that, since her mother's death
(that is to say from her very infancy), Winifred had been brought up
by an aunt in Wales. 'Quite a lady, her aunt is,' said Tom proudly,
'and Winifred has come to spend a few weeks with her father.'

He said this in a grandly paternal tone--a tone that seemed meant to
impress upon her how very much obliged she ought to feel to him for
consenting to be her father; and, judging from the look the child
gave him, she did feel very much obliged.

Suddenly, however, a thought seemed to come back upon Tom, a thought
which my unexpected appearance on the scene had driven from his
drunken brain. The look of virtuous indignation returned, and staring
at the little girl through glazed eyes, he said with the tremulous
and tearful voice of a deeply injured parent,

'Winifred, I thought I heard you singing one of them heathen Gypsy
songs that you learnt of the Gypsies in Wales.'

'No, father,' said she, 'it was the song they sing in Shire-Carnarvon
about the golden cloud over Snowdon and the spirits of the air.'

'Yes,' said Tom, 'but a little time ago you were singing a Gypsy
song--a downright heathen Gypsy song. I heard it about half an hour
ago when I was in the church.'