ly "Mr. Smith" who made further efforts
to get her child. They were very determined efforts. Miss Lydia's
landlord saw her again, and urged. She met what he had to say with a
speechless obstinacy which made him extremely angry. When he saw her a
third time he offered her an extraordinary increase in the
honorarium--for which he had the grace five minutes later to apologize.
He saw her once more, and threatened he would "take" Johnny, anyhow!

"How?" said poor, shaking Miss Lydia. Then, as a last resort, he sent
his lawyer to her, which scared her almost to death. But the interview
produced, for Mr. Smith, nothing except legal assurance that he could
doubtless secure the person of his grandson by appealing to the courts
_in the character of a grandfather_--for Miss Lydia had never taken out
papers for adoption.

"The lady has nine-tenths of the law," said Mr. Smith's legal adviser,
who had been consulted, first, as to a hypothetical case, and then told
the facts. "The other one-tenth won't secure a child whom you don't
claim as a relative. And the law means publicity."

"The hussy!" said Mr. Smith. "She's put a spoke in my wheel."

"She has," said the lawyer, and grinned behind his hand.

Mr. Smith glared at him. "That little wet hen!"

Well! after one or two more efforts, he swallowed his defeat, and,
though for nearly a year he would not recognize Miss Lydia when he met
her in the street, he made fast friends with the freckled, very
pugnacious boy at his gates. He used to stop and speak to him and tell
him to say his multiplication table, and then give him a quarter and
walk off, greatly diverted. Sometimes when he saw his daughter in
Philadelphia, he would tell her, sardonically, that "that child" had
more brains than his father and mother put together!

"Not than his father," poor, cowering Mary would protest. And her
father, looking at her with unforgiving eyes, would say, "I wish I owned
him." ("I like to scare 'em!" he added to himself.) He certainly scared
Mary. Scared her, and made her feel a strange anger, because he had
something which did not belong to him; "after all, the boy is _ours_,"
she told her husband. She always went to bed with a headache after one
of Mr. Smith's visits. As for Carl, his face would grow crimson with
helpless mortification under the gibes of his father-in-law as Mary
repeated them to him.

Once, when she told him that her father had "taken the boy home to
supper with him," h