“I think,” he concluded, “that before long my dear eldest daughter will prove a valuable amanuensis for me.”

“Papa, I am so glad!” she cried, her cheeks flushing and her eyes sparkling.  “Oh, there is nothing else in the world that I enjoy so much as being a help and comfort to my dear, dear father!”

“My precious little daughter,” he responded, “words cannot express the love your father feels for you.  Now there is one letter that I wish to write with my own hand, and while I am doing that you may amuse yourself in any way you like.”

“May I read this, papa?” she asked, taking up a magazine.

“Yes,” he said, and she went quietly from the room with it in her hand.

She seated herself on the back veranda, read a short story, then stole softly back to the library door to see if her father had finished his letter so that she might talk to him.

But some one else was there; a stranger she thought, though she did not get a view of his face.

She paused on the threshold, uncertain whether her father would wish her to be present at the interview, and at that instant he spoke, apparently in reply to something his caller had said, and his words riveted her to the spot.

“No,” he said, in stern tones, “had I been here my daughter would never have been sent back to your school.  She was most unjustly and shamefully treated by that fiery little Italian, and you, sir, upheld him in it.  When I am at hand no daughter of mine shall be struck by another man, or woman either, with impunity, and Foresti may deem himself fortunate in that I was at a distance when he ventured to commit so great an outrage upon my child.”

Lulu waited to hear no more, but ran back to the veranda, where she danced about in a tumult of delight, clapping her hands and saying exultingly to herself, “I just knew papa wouldn’t have made me go back to that horrid school and take lessons of that brute of a man.  Oh, I do wish he had been here!  How much it would have saved me!  If my father is strict and stern sometimes, he’s ever so much better and kinder than Grandpa Dinsmore.  Yes, yes, indeed, he’s such a dear father!  I wouldn’t exchange him for any other, if I could.”

Presently she suddenly ceased her jumping and dancing, and stood in an intently listening attitude.

“Yes, he’s going—­that horrid professor!  I’m so glad!  I don’t believe he’ll ever trouble this house again, while papa is in it any way,” she said half aloud.

Then running to meet her father as he returned from seeing the professor to the door, she threw her arms round him, exclaiming in a voice quivering with delight.  “Oh, you dear, dear papa, I’m so glad, so glad to know that you wouldn’t have made me go back to that horrid music teacher!  I felt sure at the time that you wouldn’t, if you were here.”

He heard her with a look of astonishment not unmixed with sternness.