She opened the door into the neat, cosey inner kitchen. No one was there, and Jim sat down by the fire with a feeling of great relief. For dinner had just been put on table, in the dining-room; Tiny, in spotless white apron and shining yellow curls, stood by her chair, and he murmured to himself,—
“I’d ’a’ choked to death, first mouthful!”
The dining-room door was not quite closed, and presently he heard Tiny saying,—
“Oh, please let me, mamma! I want to—please!”
And then she came softly in with a tempting plate of dinner, which she set upon the table.
“There!” she said, “there’s some of everything there, except the pudding, and I’ll bring you that when we have ours. I’m so glad you came to-day, because there’s a Brown Betty. I think you’d better sit this way, hadn’t you? Then you can look at the fire; it looks nice, such a cold day.”
It was all said and done with such simple sweetness and good-will, that Jim’s defences gave way at once.
“Thank you, Miss Tiny,” he said, with the grave politeness which never failed him when he spoke either to her or to her mother, and he sat down at once in the place she had chosen—for worlds he would not have wounded that gentle spirit. And he found it no hardship, after all, to eat the dinner she had brought him; what “growing boy” could have resisted it?
After dinner, when the comforting food had done more than he knew to put him in good-humor, Mrs. Leslie asked him many questions about Taffy, filling a basket as she talked, with jelly and delicate rusks and oranges. A few of the questions were by way of making sure that the place was a safe one for Johnny. She meant to go herself, the next day, to see the little boy, but she did not wish to interfere to-day with the arrangement which Jim had made. So the two boys went off together, and Jim, sure now of Johnny’s good-will, and a little ashamed of his own “cantankerousness,” as he called it to himself, talked about Taffy all the way, but only as they neared the door of the dreary lodging-house did Jim succeed in saying what lay nearest his heart.