Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/18

14 hear all about my funny relations to poor Daddy?"

The young man expressed his desire to hear. The little girl was more entertaining than his own dull musings. Philip Bolling's own rather lonely boyhood had sharpened his sympathies, instead of stunting them. The little creature whom Fate had decreed was to set up "housekeeping" with him for the journey would have touched a harder heart than his, with her pathetic mouth and her great dark eyes that one moment showed unfathomed depths of despair and another sparkled with humor.

"Won't you take off your hat first?" he suggested. "One can't go to housekeeping very well in a great bonnet. Let me hang it up for you."

"We-ell, it is rather heavy, but Mrs. O'Shea did not tell me whether I was to take it off or not. Mrs. O'Shea spent a night on a sleeper once, a long, long time ago, when she was married to her first. Of course she could tell me just what I must and mustn't take off, but she didn't mention my bonnet. She told me particularly not to leave anything in the dressing room because the porter would steal it. I don't believe the porter would want a widow's bonnet though, do you?"