'My father,' he continued, 'is eminently a man of sense if I reflect on
my boyhood, I see how admirable his treatment of me has always been. I
fancy I must have been at one time rather hard to manage; I know I was
very passionate and stubbornly self-willed. Yet he neither let me have
my own way nor angered me by his opposition. In fact, he made me respect
him. Now that we stand on equal terms, I dare say he has something of
the same feeling towards myself. And So it comes that we are excellent
friends.'

She listened with a scarcely perceptible smile.

'Perhaps this seems to you a curiously dispassionate way of treating
such a subject,' Wilfrid added, with a laugh. 'It illustrates what I
meant in saying I doubted whether there was deep sympathy between us.
Your own feeling for your father is clearly one of devotedness. You
would think no sacrifice of your own wishes too great if he asked it of
you.'

'I cannot imagine any sacrifice, which my father could ask, that I
should refuse.'

She spoke with some difficulty, as if she wished to escape the subject.

'Perhaps that is a virtue that your sex helps to explain,' said Wilfrid,
musingly.

'You do not know,' he added, when a bee had hummed between them for half
a minute, 'how constant my regret is that my mother did not live till I
was old enough to make a friend of her. You know that she was an