"Poor little boy!" she murmured. "I should miss him if he was gone. Yes, I should terribly."
She wiped her eyes, and then tucked up Bartie for the night.
II.
CAUGHT ON THE BAR.
Dave Fletcher and Dick Pray were boys who had grown up in the same town, but from the same soil had come two very different productions. They were unlike in their personal appearance. Dick Pray would come down the street throwing his head to right and left, scattering sharp, eager glances from his restless black eyes, and swinging his hands.
"Somebody is coming," people would be very likely to say.
Dave Fletcher had a quiet, unobtrusive, straight-forward way of walking. Dick was quite a handsome youth; but the person that Dave Fletcher saw in the glass was ordinary in feature, with pleasant, honest eyes of blue, and hair--was it brown or black?
Dave sometimes wished it were browner or blacker, and not "a go-between," as he had told his mother.
Dave and Dick were not as yet trying to make their own way; but they were between fifteen and sixteen, and knew that they must soon be stirring for themselves.
They had already begun to intimate how they would stir in after life.