"Yes'm," Johnny said. "Kitty, Kitty!" Then he called: "Say, Aunty! Let's try her with milk!"
Miss Lydia, coming to the door with a saucer of milk, stood for a paralyzed moment, then she said, "How do you do, Mary?"
"You haven't forgotten me?" Mrs. Robertson said.
"Well, no," said Miss Lydia.
"Lovely day," Mary said, breathing quickly; then she waved a trembling hand. "Good-by! Go on, Charles." Charles flicked his whip and off she rumbled in the very same old victoria in which her father had rolled by Miss Lydia's door in the September dusk some fifteen years before.
That night Johnny's mother said to her husband, almost in a whisper, "I—spoke to him."
He put a kindly arm around her. "Isn't he as fine a boy as you ever saw?"
After that Mrs. Robertson spoke to Johnny Smith frequently and Miss Lydia continued to lose flesh. The month that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson were to spend in Old Chester lengthened into two—into three. And while they were there wonderful things happened to Johnny in the way of presents—a lathe, a velocipede, a little engine to turn a wheel in the run at the foot of old Mr. Smith's pasture. Also, he and his aunt Lydia were invited to take supper with Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. "We'll have to ask her," Johnny's mother had said to Johnny's father, "because it would look queer to have him come by himself. Oh, Carl, I am beginning to hate her!"
"You mustn't, dear; she's good to him."
"I want to be good to him!"