The boy cast an abashed glance at her. The street-lamp shone full on
his face, which was round and reddened by the frosty winds, with an
aimlessly grinning mouth of uncertain youth, and black eyes with a
bold and cheerful outlook on the unknown. He was only ten, but he
was large for his age. Ellen, when he looked from her grandmother
back at her, thought him almost a man, and then she saw that he was
the boy who had brought the chestnuts to her the night when she had
returned from her runaway excursion. The boy recognized her at the
same moment, and his mouth seemed to gape wider, and a moist red
overspread his face down to his swathing woollen scarf. Then he gave
another whoop significant of the extreme of nervous abashedness and
the incipient defiance of his masculine estate, there was a flourish
of heels, followed by a swift glimmering slide of steel, and he was
off trailing his sled.
"That's that Joy boy that brought Ellen the chestnuts that time,"
Fanny said. "Do you remember him, Ellen?"
"Yes, ma'am," replied Ellen. The look of the boy in her face had
bewildered and confused her, without her knowing the why of it. It
was as if she had spelled a word in her reading-book whose meaning
she could not grasp.
"I don't care who he is," said Mrs. Zelotes, "he 'ain't no business
racin' out of gates that way, and his folks hadn't ought to let a
boy no older than that out alone of nights."
They kept on, and the boy apparently left them far behind in his
career of youthful exuberance, until they came to the factories.
Andrew looked up at the windows of Lloyd's, dark except for a faint
glimmer in a basement window from the lamp of the solitary watchman,
and drew a heavy sigh.
"It ain't as bad for you as it is for some," his mother said,
sharply, and then she jumped aside, catching her son's arm as the
boy sprang out of a covering shadow under the wall of Lloyd's and
dashed before them with another wild whoop and another glance of
defiant bashfulness at Ellen.
"My land! it's that boy again," cried Mrs. Zelotes. "Here, you
boy!--boy! What's your name?"
"His name is Granville Joy," Ellen replied, unexpectedly.
"Why, how did you know, child?" her grandmother asked. "Seems to me
he's got a highfalutin' name enough. Here you, Granville--if that's
your name--don't you know any better than to--" But the boy was
gone, his sled creaking on the hard snow at his heels, and a faint
whoop sounded from the distance.
"I guess if I had the bringin' up of that boy there wouldn't be such
doin's," said Mrs. Zelotes, severely. "His mother's a pretty woman,
but I don't believe she's got much force. She wouldn't have given
him such a name if she had."
"She named him after the town she came from," said Fanny. "She told
me once. She's a real smart woman, and she makes that boy stand
around."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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