After that she was silent for so long that Maurice led the little boy out of the room. As he brought him into the parlor, Henry Houghton, who had just come in, looked at the father and son, and felt astonishment tingle in his veins like an electric shock. He gripped Maurice's hand, silently, and gave Jacky's ear a friendly pull.
"Edith," Maurice Said, "I would take him home, but I mustn't leave Eleanor. Will you get one of the maids to put him on a Medfield car—"
"I'll take him," Edith said.
Maurice began to say, sharply, "No!" then he stopped; after all, why not? "She must know the whole business by this time. Jacky's face gives it all away." She might as well, he thought, know Jacky's mother, as she knew his father.
Jacky, in a little growling voice, said, "Don't want nobody to put me on no car. I can—"
"Be quiet, my boy," Maurice said, gently. He gave Edith Lily's address and went back upstairs.
Henry Houghton, watching and listening, felt his face twitch; then he blew his nose loudly. "I'll look after him," he told Edith. "I—I'll take him to—the person he lives with. It isn't suitable for a girl—"
In spite of the gravity of the moment his girl laughed. "Father, you are a lamb! No; I'll take him." Then she gave Jacky a cooky, which he ate thoughtfully.
"We have 'em nicer at our house," he said. On the corner, waiting for the Medfield car, Edith offered a friendly hand, which he refused to notice. The humiliation of being taken home, "by a woman!" was scorching his little pride. He made up his mind that if them scab Dennett boys seen him getting out of the car with a woman, he'd lick the tar out of them! All the way to Maple Street he sat with his face glued to the window, never speaking a word to the "woman." When the car stopped he pushed out ahead of her and tore down the street. Happily no Dennett boys saw him!—but he dashed past his mother, who was standing at the gate, and disappeared in the house.
Lily, bareheaded in the pale April sunshine, had been watching for him rather anxiously. In deference to the occasion she had changed her dress; a string of green-glass beads, encircling her plump white neck, glimmered through the starched freshness of an incredibly frank blouse, and her white duck skirt was spotless. Her whole little fat body was as fresh and sweet as one of her own hyacinths, and her kind face had the unchanging, unhuman youthfulness of flesh and blood which has never been harried by the indwelling soul. But she was frowning. She had begun to be nervous; Jacky had been away nearly two hours! "Are they playing a gum game on me?" Lily thought; "Are they going to try and kidnap him?" It was then that she caught sight of Jacky, tearing toward home, his fierce blue eyes raking the street for any of them there Dennett boys, who must have the tar licked out of 'em! Edith was following him, in hurrying anxiety. Instantly Lily was reassured. "One of Mrs. Curtis's lady friends, I suppose," she thought. "Well, it's up to me to keep her guessing on Jacky!" She was very polite and simpering when, at the gate, Edith said that Mr. Curtis asked her to bring Jacky home.