“Autograph.”
“Yeth, your au—to—graph in my album.”
“That’s right, autograph, autograph, don’t forget. Now let me hear you say it.”
“Pleathe write your autograph in my book.”
Mrs. Philpot caught the child to her breast and kissed it vigorously, and not long afterward little May went forth to try the experiment. She was armed with her mother’s autograph album. When she approached her victim he thought he never had seen so lovely a child. The mother had not spared pains to give most effect to the little thing’s delicate and appealing beauty by an artistic arrangement of the shining gold hair and by the simplest but cunningest tricks of color and drapery.
With that bird-like shyness so winning in a really beautiful little girl, May walked up to the stranger and made a funny, hesitating courtesy. He looked at her askance, his smiling face shooting forth a ray of tenderness along with a gleam of shrewd suspicion, as he made out the album in her dimpled little hand.
“Good morning, little one,” he said cheerily. “Have you come to make a call?”
He held out both hands and looked so kindly and good that she smiled until dimples just like her mother’s played over her cheeks and chin. Half sidewise she crept into his arms and held up the book.
“Pleathe write your photograph in my book,” she murmured.
He took her very gently on his knee, chuckling vigorously, his heavy jaws shaking and coloring.