"Well," said Johnny, scrubbing the back of his hand across his cheeks, "she's always kissing me and talking about my liking her. Oh—I don't really mind her, much. She's nice enough. But I don't like kissing ladies. But I like visiting her," he added, candidly; "she takes me to lots of places and gives me things. I like presents," said Johnny. "I hope she'll gimme a gun." . . .
That night, the kissing lady, pacing up and down like a caged creature in her handsome parlor, which seemed so empty and orderly now, said suddenly to her husband, "Why don't we adopt him?"
"H-s-s-h!" he cautioned her; then, in a low voice, "I've thought of that."
At which she instantly retreated. "It is out of the question! People would—think."
CHAPTER VI
JOHNNY would have had his gun right off, and many other things, too, if Miss Lydia hadn't interfered. "Please don't send him so many presents," she wrote Mrs. Robertson in her scared, determined way. And Mary, reading that letter, fed her bitterness with the memory of something which had happened during the visit.
"It's just what I said," she told Johnny's father; "she influences him against us by not letting us give him presents! I know that from the way he talks. I told him, after I bought the stereopticon for him, that I could give him nicer things than she could, and—"
"Mary! You mustn't say things like that!"