"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 Lydia said again, "Yes." "Maybe Mrs. Robertson'll gimme one," Johnny said, hopefully; "she's always giving me things!" However, though Johnny's gratitude consisted of a lively hope of benefits to come, he had some opinions of his own. "She kisses me," he said to Miss Lydia, wrinkling up his nose. "I don't like kissing ladies." Poor Mary couldn't help kissing him. The fresh, honest, ugly young face had become more wonderful to her than anything else on earth! But sometimes she looked at him and then at his father, and said to herself, "His eyes are not like Carl's, but his mouth is as Carl's used to be before he wore a beard; but nobody would know it now."