Beadle's Dime Novels No. 3: Myra, the Child of Adoption — page 57: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

' FATHER AND OHILD. 55 “And are you glad fo sce me, darling?” said Mr. Clark, drawing his hand caressingly down the disheveled brightness of her hair. “ You seem glad, my little Myra ?” “Seem—why—I am glad—so very, very glad, my own, own—” the child hesitated. “Papa—will you not call me papa, this once?” said the agitated father, and upon his pale cheek there came a flush, as he said this to the child. “Oh, but they tell me that you are my godfather, and that is not a papa, you know,” said the child, shaking her head with an air of pretty thoughtfulness. “Perhaps it is as well,” murmured the father, and his look grew sad. Myra bent down and looked into his eyes, smiling. “Don’t look so sorry,” she said; “I will call you papa, if you like. Papa! dear papa! there, now !” But even the childish caress, accompanied as it was by a voice and look of the most winning sweetness, failed to dispel the sadness that had fallen upon the father’s heart. Perhaps the very loveliness of the child did but deepen that sadness, by reminding him of its mother. Let this be as it may, Mr. Clark sat down by the fountain with the little girl in his arms, but he remained silent, thus chilling the little creature whose arms were about his neck, and she too became hushed, as it were, by the gloom into which he fell. During several min- utes the father and child remained thus wrapped in silence. At last he spoke in a low and troubled voice, kissing the fore- head of the child : “ Myra, do you love me?” “Indeed, indeed I do,” said the little girl, laying her cheek to his. “ Better almost than anybody else in the wide world, if you are only my godfather.” “And whom—” here Mr. Clark’s voice faltered—“ and whom can you love better, Myra ?” “ Oh,” said the child,*shaking her head with a pretty mys- terious air, “ there is somebody that I love so much, a pretty, beautiful lady, who tomes to me so often, and so strangely, ‘just like one of the fairies nurse tells me about. Sometimes she will be a long, long time, and not come at all. Then, while I am playing among the trees, she will be close to me = Conijebooksrcom