What is your remark on that proportion?’ And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too.”

“Of course it was.”

“Then Mr. McChoakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, ‘Here are the stutterings——’ ”

“Statistics,” said Louisa.

“Yes, Miss Louisa—they always remind me of stut terings, and that’s another of my mistakes—of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr. McChoakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss”—here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error—“I said it was nothing.”

“Nothing, Sissy?”

“Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,” said Sissy. “And the worst of all is that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like it.”

Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head as it drooped abashed before her until it was raised again to glance at her face. Then she asked:

“Did your father know so much himself that he wished you to be well taught, too, Sissy?”

Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that they were entering on forbidden ground that Louisa added, “No one hears us, and if anyone did I am sure no harm could be found in such an innocent question.”

“No, Miss Louisa,” answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her head, “Father knows very little indeed. It’s as much as he can do to write, and it’s more than people in general can do to read his writing. Though it’s plain to me.”

“Your mother!”

“Father says she was quite a scholar. She died when I was born. She was”—Sissy made the terrible communication nervously—“she was a dancer.”

“Did your father love her?” Louisa asked these questions with a strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a banished creature and hiding in solitary places.

“Oh yes! As dearly as he loves me. Father loved me, first, for her sake. He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby. We have never been asunder from that time.”

“Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?”

“Only for my good. Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I do. When he left me for my good—he never would have left me for his own—I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial. He will not be happy for a single minute till he comes back.”

“Tell me more about him,” said Louisa; “I will never ask you again. Where did you live?”

“We travelled about the country and had no fixed place to live in. Father’s a”—Sissy whispered the awful word—“a clown.”

“To make the people laugh?” said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.

“Yes. But they wouldn’t laugh sometimes, and then Father cried. Lately, they very often wouldn’t laugh, and he used to come home despairing. Father’s not like most. Those who didn’t know him as well as I do, and didn’t love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right. Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me. He was far, far timider than they thought!”

“And you were his comfort through everything?”

She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face. “I hope so, and Father said I was. It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal and be different from him.