hman; then, leaning forward,
she tried to speak. Her breath came with a gasp. "Are you the--the boy
who lives with Miss Sampson?"

"Yes'm," Johnny said. "Kitty, Kitty!" Then he called: "Say, Aunty! Let's
try her with milk!"

Miss Lydia, coming to the door with a saucer of milk, stood for a
paralyzed moment, then she said, "How do you do, Mary?"

"You haven't forgotten me?" Mrs. Robertson said.

"Well, no," said Miss Lydia.

"Lovely day," Mary said, breathing quickly; then she waved a trembling
hand. "Good-by! Go on, Charles." Charles flicked his whip and off she
rumbled in the very same old victoria in which her father had rolled by
Miss Lydia's door in the September dusk some fifteen years before.

That night Johnny's mother said to her husband, almost in a whisper,
"I--spoke to him."

He put a kindly arm around her. "Isn't he as fine a boy as you ever
saw?"

After that Mrs. Robertson spoke to Johnny Smith frequently and Miss
Lydia continued to lose flesh. The month that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson
were to spend in Old Chester lengthened into two--into three. And while
they were there wonderful things happened to Johnny in the way of
presents--a lathe, a velocipede, a little engine to turn a wheel in the
run at the foot of old Mr. Smith's pasture. Also, he and his aunt Lydia
were invited to take supper with Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. "We'll have to
ask _her_," Johnny's mother had said to Johnny's father, "because it
would look queer to have him come by himself. Oh, Carl, I am beginning
to hate her!"

"You mustn't, dear; she's good to him."

"_I_ want to be good to him!"

However, Miss Lydia, in her once-turned and twice-made-over blue silk,
came and sat at the big table in the new Mr. Smith's dining room. She
hardly spoke, but just sat there, the vein on her temple throbbing with
fright, and listened to Johnny's mother pouring herself out in fatuous
but pathetic flattery and in promises of all sorts of delights.

"Mary, my _dear_!" Carl Robertson protested, but he felt the pain of the
poor, child-hungry woman at the other end of the table.

When Miss Lydia and Johnny walked home together in the darkness her boy
said: "A fellow'd be lucky with a mother like that, wouldn't he? She'd
give him everything he wanted. She'd give him a pony," Johnny said,
wistfully.

"Yes," said Miss Lydia, faintly.

"Wish I had a mother who'd gimme a pony," Johnny said, with the brutal
honesty of his sex and years.

And Miss Lyd