This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
22
THAT ROYLE GIRL

and cried; she remembered that she begged him to be her father; and when he denied that he really could be, she asked him who was her father, and he replied, "I never had the privilege of meeting the gentleman." Then their ten minutes were up and Joan never was successful at re-opening the subject with Dads; and she never was able to mention the matter to her mother. If Dads had told her mother what he had imparted, mamma completely ignored the disclosure.

The chief effect of it was upon Dads; for Joan Daisy loved him just the same. Indeed, she felt even a more filial devotion when she thought how devotedly he had cared for her, since she had been an infant, though he was not her father.

Apparently he felt that he had freed her from any share of shame for what he did and from any responsibility for his extraordinary manner of gaining their living; and, having thus freed her, he embarked upon bolder ventures in false and elaborate pretense.

Joan Daisy set to work that summer, starting as an errand girl in a milliner's shop and thereafter she earned what money she personally spent; and later, when she had advanced herself to better positions, she sometimes paid a claim against Dads.

Nothing made him so angry as to discover such a transaction. He would not speak to her for days afterwards.

Of the several names which he employed, he went most frequently by that of James Morton Royle. Perhaps it was his own, Joan Daisy thought; or perhaps he found it the luckiest or most impressive. She never heard him mention his own people and he was most contradictory in regard to the section of the country in which he had been reared. Sometimes it had been New England and he spoke with a Massachusetts mannerism; some-