imme a gun." . . .

That night, the kissing lady, pacing up and down like a caged creature
in her handsome parlor, which seemed so empty and orderly now, said
suddenly to her husband, "Why don't we adopt him?"

"H-s-s-h!" he cautioned her; then, in a low voice, "I've thought of
that."

At which she instantly retreated. "It is out of the question! People
would--think."

CHAPTER VI

JOHNNY would have had his gun right off, and many other things, too, if
Miss Lydia hadn't interfered. "Please don't send him so many presents,"
she wrote Mrs. Robertson in her scared, determined way. And Mary,
reading that letter, fed her bitterness with the memory of something
which had happened during the visit.

"It's just what I said," she told Johnny's father; "she influences him
against us by not letting us give him presents! I know that from the way
he talks. I told him, after I bought the stereopticon for him, that I
could give him nicer things than she could, and--"

"Mary! You mustn't say things like that!"

"And--and--" Mary said, crying, "he said, 'I like Aunty without any
presents.' You see? Influence! The idea of her daring to say we mustn't
give him a gun. He's _ours_!"

"No, he's hers," Johnny's father said, sadly; "she has the whip hand,
Mary--unless we tell the truth."

"Of course we can't do that," she said, sobbing.

But after that Philadelphia experience Miss Lydia--a fragile creature
now, who lived and breathed for her boy--was obliged every winter to let
Johnny visit these people who had disowned him, cast him off, deserted
him!--that was the way she put it to herself. She had to let him go
because she couldn't think of any excuse for saying he couldn't go. She
even asked Doctor Lavendar for a reason for refusing invitations, which
the appreciative and frankly acquisitive Johnny was anxious to accept.
With a present of a bunch of lamplighters in her hand she went to the
rectory, offering, as an explanation of her call, the fact that Johnny
had got into a fight with the youngest Mack boy and rubbed his nose in
the gutter, and Mrs. Mack was very angry, and said her boy's nose would
never be handsome again; and she, Miss Lydia, didn't know what to do
because Johnny wouldn't tell her what the fight was about and wouldn't
apologize.

"Johnny's fifteen and the Mack boy is seventeen; and a boy doesn't need
a handsome nose," said Doctor Lavendar. "I'd not interfere, if I were
you."

Then she got the rea