ctfully as one avoids a new disease germ.
His native point of view, however, had been somewhat deflected by his
associations. His intimate circle consisted of a set of people who
indorsed his mother's decalogue only under protest, and with the most
stringent reservations. That is, they were young and healthy, and
somewhat overcharged with animal spirits, and their reactions were all
very intense and emphatic.

He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely
to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother's. His mother's
friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the
shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly
brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of
her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it
was set, was a line of dirt,--a tear mark, it might have been, though
that didn't make the general effect any less untidy, David thought;
only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl,
that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend
of his mother's would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as
wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a
taxicab, or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if
he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little
stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for.

"I thought you'd like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab,
because you can see more. You've never been in this part of New York
before, I understand."

"No, sir."

"You came up from Colhassett last Saturday, didn't you? Mrs. O'Farrel
wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the
Saturday night boat from Fall River."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you travel alone, Eleanor?"

"A friend of Grandpa's came up on the train with me, and left me on
the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all
right,--Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward."

"And were you all right?" David's eyes twinkled.

"Yes, sir."

"Not sea sick, nor homesick?"

The child's fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again
into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had
witnessed a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of
the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school.

"I wasn't sea sick."

"Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor." Then as she d