"Oh, let the child be, can't you, Fanny ?" he said, when his wife speculated whether Ellen would be or do this or that when she should be a woman.

He resented the conception of the woman which would swallow up, like some metaphysical sorceress, his fair little child.

So when he now and then led Ellen past the factories it was never with the slightest surmise as to any connection which she might have with them beyond the present one.

"There's the shop where father works," he would tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own importance in his child's eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when Ellen was able to point with her tiny pink finger at the window where father worked.

"That's where father works and earns money to buy nice things for little Ellen," Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with divine foolishness, and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building as she might have looked at the wheels of progress.