"Yes, you can call again," she added, mentally, as she watched the deacon making his way slowly down the garden walk, stopping the while to inspect every plant that looked promising. "You can call again, but you will not see him, if you come every day. It does beat all, the way folks can't let that boy alone. Talk about his being cranky! I'd be ten times as cranky as he is, if I was pestered by every old podogger that's got stuff to sell."
She closed the door, and addressed the house, apparently empty and still. "He's gone!" she said, speaking rather loudly, "Don 'Lonzo, he's gone, and you can come out. I expect you're hid somewheres about here, for I didn't hear you go out."
There was no sound. She opened the door of the ground-floor bedroom and looked in. All was tidy and pleasant as usual. Every mat lay in its place; the chairs were set against the wall as she loved to see them; the rows of books, the shelves of chemicals, at which she hardly dared to look, and which she never dared to touch for fear something would "go off" and kill her instantly, the specimens in their tall glass jars, the case of butterflies, all were in their place; but there was no sign of life in the room, save the canary in the window.
"Deacon Bassett's gone!" she said, speaking to the canary.
There was a scuffling sound from under the bed; the valance was lifted, and a head emerged cautiously.
"I tell you he's gone!" repeated Mira Pitkin, rather impatiently. "Come out, Don Alonzo! There! you are foolish, I must say!"
The head came out, followed by a figure. The figure was that of a boy of twelve, but the head belonged to a youth of seventeen. The rounded shoulders, the sharp features, the dark, sunken eyes, all told a tale of suffering; Don Alonzo Pitkin was a hunchback.
His pretty, silly mother had given him the foolish name which seemed a perpetual mockery of his feeble person. She had found it in an old romance, and had only wavered between it and Señor Gonzalez,—which she pronounced Seener Gon-zallies,—the other dark-eyed hero of the book. Perhaps she pictured to herself her baby growing up into such another lofty, black-plumed hidalgo as those whose magnificent language and mustachios had so deeply impressed her. It was true that she herself had pinkish eyes and white eyelashes, while her husband was familiarly known as "Carrots,"—but what of that?
But he had a fall, this poor baby,—a cruel fall, from the consequences of which no high-sounding name could save him; and then presently the little mother died, and the father married again.
The boy's childhood had been a sad one, and all the happiness he had known had been lately, since his elder brother married. Big, good-natured Joe Pitkin, marrying the prettiest girl in the village, had been sore at heart, even in his new-wedded happiness, at the thought of leaving the deformed, sensitive boy alone with the careless father and the shrewish stepmother. But his young wife had been the first to say: