Well! after one or two more efforts, he swallowed his defeat, and, though for nearly a year he would not recognize Miss Lydia when he met her in the street, he made fast friends with the freckled, very pugnacious boy at his gates. He used to stop and speak to him and tell him to say his multiplication table, and then give him a quarter and walk off, greatly diverted. Sometimes when he saw his daughter in Philadelphia, he would tell her, sardonically, that "that child" had more brains than his father and mother put together!
"Not than his father," poor, cowering Mary would protest. And her father, looking at her with unforgiving eyes, would say, "I wish I owned him." ("I like to scare 'em!" he added to himself.) He certainly scared Mary. Scared her, and made her feel a strange anger, because he had something which did not belong to him; "after all, the boy is ours," she told her husband. She always went to bed with a headache after one of Mr. Smith's visits. As for Carl, his face would grow crimson with helpless mortification under the gibes of his father-in-law as Mary repeated them to him.
Once, when she told him that her father had "taken the boy home to supper with him," he swore under his breath, and she agreed, hurriedly:
"Father was simply mad to notice him! People will guess—"
But Carl broke in: "Oh, I didn't mean that. No one would ever suspect anything. I meant, what right has he to get fond of—the boy?"
"Not the slightest!" Mary said. And they neither of them knew that they were beginning to be jealous.
The occasion of Mr. Smith's "madness" was one winter afternoon when, meeting Johnny in the road, he took him into his carriage, then sent word to Miss Lydia that he was keeping the child to supper. He put him in a big chair at the other end of the table and baited him with questions, and roared with laughter and pride at his replies. Also, he gave him good advice, as a grandfather should:
"I hear you are a bad boy and get into fights. Never fight, sir, never fight! But if you do fight, lick your man."
"Yes, sir," said Johnny.
"And don't be afraid to tackle a bigger man than yourself. Only cowards are afraid to do that!"