For answer Mrs. Jett met him with the crescendo yell of a gale sweeping around a chimney.

“Ya-a-ah!  Keep out—­you!  Fish!  Fish!” she cried, springing toward him; and in the struggle that ensued the tubing wrenched off the gas lamp and plunged them into darkness.  “Fish!  I’ll fix you!  Ya-a-ah!”

“Emmy!  For God’s sake, it’s Henry!  Em!”

“Ya-a-ah!  I’ll fix you!  Fish!  Fish!”

* * * * *

Two days later Ann Elizabeth was born, beautiful, but premature by two weeks.

Emma Jett died holding her tight against her newly rich breasts, for a few of the most precious and most fleeting moments of her life.

All her absurd fears washed away, her free hand could lie without spasm in Henry’s, and it was as if she found in her last words a secret euphony that delighted her.

“Ann-Elizabeth.  Sweet-beautiful.  Ann-Elizabeth.  Sweet-beautiful.”

Later in his bewildered and almost ludicrous widowerhood tears would sometimes galumph down on his daughter’s face as Henry rocked her of evenings and Sunday mornings.

“Sweet-beautiful,” came so absurdly from under his swiftly graying mustache, but often, when sure he was quite alone, he would say it over and over again.

“Sweet-beautiful.  Ann-Elizabeth.  Sweet-beautiful.  Ann-Elizabeth.”

* * * * *

Of course the years puttied in and healed and softened, until for Henry almost a Turner haze hung between him and some of the stark facts of Emma Jett’s death, turping out horror, which is always the first to fade from memory, and leaving a dear sepia outline of the woman who had been his.

At seventeen, Ann Elizabeth was the sun, the sky, the west wind, and the shimmer of spring—­all gone into the making of her a rosebud off the stock of his being.

His way of putting it was, “You’re my all, Annie, closer to me than I am to myself.”

She hated the voweling of her name, and because she was so nimble with youth could dance away from these moods of his rather than plumb them.

“I won’t be ‘Annie.’  Please, daddy, I’m your Ann Elizabeth.”

“Ann Elizabeth, then.  My Ann Elizabeth,” an inner rhythm in him echoing:  Sweet-Beautiful.  Sweet-Beautiful.

There was actually something of the lark about her.  She awoke with a song, sometimes kneeling up in bed, with her pretty brown hair tousling down over her shoulders and chirruping softly to herself into the little bird’s-eye-maple dressing-table mirror, before she flung her feet over the side of the bed.

And then, innate little housekeeper that she was, it was to the preparing of breakfast with a song, her early morning full of antics.  Tiptoeing in to awaken her father to the tickle of a broom straw.  Spreading his breakfast piping hot, and then concealing herself behind a screen, that he might marvel at the magic of it.  And once she put salt in his coffee, a fresh cup concealed behind the toast rack, and knee to knee they rocked in merriment at his grimace.