She loved thus to tease him, probably because he was so stolid that each new adventure came to him with something of a shock.  He was forever being taken unawares, as if he could never become entirely accustomed to the wonder of her, and that delighted her.  Even the obviousness of his slippers stuffed out with carrots could catch him napping.  To her dance of glee behind him, he kept poking and poking to get into them, only the peck of her kiss upon his neck finally initiating him into the absurdity.

There was a little apartment of five rooms, twenty minutes removed by Subway from the fish store; her bedroom, all pink and yellow maple; his; a kitchen, parlor, and dining room worked out happily in white-muslin curtains, spindle-legged parlor chairs, Henry’s newfangled chifferobe and bed with a fine depth of mattress, and a kitchen with eight shining pots above the sink and a border of geese, cut out to the snip of Ann’s own scissors, waddling across the wall.

It was two and a half years since Mrs. Plush had died, and the boarders, as if spilled from an ark on rough seas, had struck out for diverse shores.  The marvel to them now was that they had delayed so long.

“A home of our own, Ann.  Pretty sweet, isn’t it?”

“Oh, daddy, it is!”

“You mustn’t overdo, though, baby.  Sometimes we’re not so strong as we think we are.  A little hired girl would be best.”  The fish business had more than held its own.

“But I love doing it alone, dad.  It—­it’s the next best thing to a home of—­my own.”

He looked startled into her dreaming eyes.

“Your own?  Why, Annie, isn’t this—­your own?”

She laid fingers against his eyes so that he could not see the pinkiness of her.

“You know what I mean, daddy—­my—­very—­own.”

At that timid phrasing of hers Henry felt that his heart was actually strangling, as if some one were holding it back on its systolic swing, like a caught pendulum.

“Why, Annie,” he said, “I never thought—­”

But inevitably and of course it had happened.

The young man’s name was Willis—­Fred E. Willis—­already credit man in a large wholesale grocery firm and two feet well on the road to advancement.  A square-faced, clean-faced fellow, with a clean love of life and of Ann Elizabeth in his heart.

Henry liked him.

Ann Elizabeth loved him.

And yet, what must have been a long-smoldering flame of fear shot up through the very core of Henry’s being, excoriating.

“Why, Ann Elizabeth,” he kept repeating, in his slow and always inarticulate manner, “I—­You—­Mine—­I just never thought.”

She wound the softest of arms about his neck.

“I know, daddy-darlums, and I’ll never leave you.  Never.  Fred has promised we will always be together.  We’ll live right here with you, or you with us.”

“Annie,” he cried, “you mustn’t ever—­marry.  I mean, leave daddy—­that way—­anyway.  You hear me?  You’re daddy’s own.  Just his by himself.  Nobody is good enough for my girl.”