motherless daughters, Felix had seen at a glance that
he was either too engrossed in his business or too dense
and unimaginative to understand so winning a child.
She was Masie, "dot little girl of mine dot don't got
no mudder," or "Beesvings, who don't never be still,"
but that was about as far as his notice of her went, except
sending her to school, seeing that she was fed and
clothed, and on such state occasions as Christmas, New
Year's, or birthdays, giving her meaningless little presents,
which, in most instances, were shut up in her
bureau drawers, never to be looked at again.

Kitty, who remembered the child's mother as a girl
with a far-away look in her eyes and a voice of surprising
sweetness, always maintained that it was a
shame for Kling, who was many years her senior, to
have married the girl at all.

"Not, John, dear, that Otto isn't a decent man, as
far as he goes," she had once said to him, when the
day's work was over and they were discussing their
neighbors, "and that honest, too, that he wouldn't get
away with a sample trunk weighing a ton if it was
nailed fast to the sidewalk, and a good friend of ours
who wouldn't go back on us, and never did. But that
wife of his, John! If she wasn't as fine as the best of
em, then I miss my guess. She got it from that father
of hers--the clock-maker that never went out in the
daytime, and hid himself in his back shop. There was
something I never understood about the two of 'em