she asked:
    »Did your father know so much himself, that he wished you to be well taught
too, Sissy?«
    Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that they
were entering on forbidden ground, that Louisa added, »No one hears us; and if
any one did, I am sure no harm could be found in such an innocent question.«
    »No, Miss Louisa,« answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her
head; »father knows very little indeed. It's as much as he can do to write; and
it's more than people in general can do to read his writing. Though it's plain
to me.«
    »Your mother!«
    »Father says she was quite a scholar. She died when I was born. She was;«
Sissy made the terrible communication nervously; »she was a dancer.«
    »Did your father love her?« Louisa asked these questions with a strong,
wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a
banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.
    »O yes! As dearly as he loves me. Father loved me, first, for her sake. He
carried me about with him when I was quite a baby. We have never been asunder
from that time.«
    »Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?«
    »Only for my good. Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I do.
When he left me for my good - he never would have left me for his own - I know
he was almost broken-hearted with the trial. He will not be happy for a single
minute, till he comes back.«
    »Tell me more about him,« said Louisa, »I will never ask you again. Where
did you live?«
    »We travelled about the country, and had no fixed place to live in. Father's
a;« Sissy whispered the awful word, »a clown.«
    »To make the people laugh?« said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.
    »Yes. But they wouldn't laugh sometimes, and then father cried. Lately, they
very often wouldn't laugh, and he used to come home despairing. Father's not
like most. Those who didn't know him as well as I do, and didn't love him as
dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right. Sometimes they played
tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt them,