"Oh, I suppose so," the boy said tolerantly. "It stand ter reason city folks can't feed you like they do at home. When you have to put down a nickel or a dime for every mite o' food you buy, for every pinch o' corn meal, and every orange, it comes hard to set much on the table. And if a feller goes out to one o' these restaurants to feed, why before he's reached the pie, if he don't look out, he's eat up his day's wages." "Eaten, Tom." "Yes'm, eaten." "I do hope you aren't going to be careless in the way you talk, Tom. I hope you haven't learned a lot of new slang." "Yes'm." "You look well, anyway!" Hertha said, surveying him carefully. She was pleased not only at his good health, but at the way he dressed, the evident care he had taken to be neat and cleanly. Her pride in him grew for she could see that he had improved as he had taken on responsibility. Evidently it had thus far worked well for him to break loose from his women folk and school and to shift for himself. "What you doing, Hertha?" Tom questioned. She told him a little of her life, her pleasant room upstairs, her work at stenography. But she preferred to listen, and before long he was again the chief talker, retailing every bit of news, no matter how trivial, that had come in the letters from home. Her eagerness was so evident, and her happiness in seeing him so apparent, that Tom wondered to himself why she had never given them the chance to communicate with her during the months she had been away. As though she sensed his question she said, hesitating, the blood rushing to her cheeks: "You mustn't think I didn't want to hear from everybody; I did so much. And I sent them cards at Christmas that I was well. Were you at school then?" For answer he drew from his pocket her gift, and spun the top a moment on his sleeve when it fell to the floor. Hertha picked it up as she had picked up so many of his toys and put it in his brown hand where it descended to his pocket again. She was standing now, looking into his face. "Mammy told me," she said, "not to try to live in two worlds, not until I was sure fixed in the new one and," shaking her head, "it takes a long time to get fixed. But that wasn't the only reason. If I'd written and they'd answered--it's such a little place, sometimes not half-a-dozen letters in the post office--why, every one in Merryvale would have known where I was." She hesitated, blushing, but she had said enough. The look of anger on the boy's face recalled suddenly to her remembrance the Sunday that they had stopped on the porch of the great house and Lee Merryvale had tried to send Tom home alone. Did he guess the shame of the weeks after his departure, weeks that all her pride had not been able wholly to push from her memory? She shrank at his rough answer. "You're right," he said. "I's glad you won't have nothing to do with that skunk." There was a rush of feet on the kitchen stairs, and Bob surprised them both by plunging into the room.