This had been a year ago; and Amos was sure that Foley’s gratitude would take the form of a clamor for revenge. Mrs. Foley dated their present prosperity entirely from that day; she had superadded a personal attachment to an impersonal gratitude; she sold Miss Clark eggs, and little Mamie had the reversion of the usurer’s shoes. Amos sighed. “Well, I can’t blame ’em,” he muttered. From that day had dated his own closer acquaintance.
He now occasionally paid a visit at the old gentlewoman’s home. Once she asked him to tea. And Raker went about for days in a broad grin at the image of Amos, who, indeed, made a very careful toilet with his new blue sack-coat, white duck trousers, and tan-colored shoes. He told Raker that he had had a delightful supper. Mrs. O’Shea, the char-woman, was without at the kitchen stove, and little Mamie Foley brought in the hot waffles and jam. Esquire Clark showed his gifts by vaulting over the grape-arbor, trying to enter through the wire screen, bent on joining the company, and the Colonel wept audibly outside, until Amos begged for their admission. Safely on their respective seats, their behavior, in general, was beyond criticism. Only once the Colonel, feeling that the frying chicken was unconscionably long in coming his way, gave a low howl of irrepressible feeling; and Esquire Clark (no doubt from sympathy) leaped after Mamie and the dish.
“’Squire, I’m ashamed of you!” cried Miss Clark; “Archie, you know better!” Amos paid no visible attention to the change of name; but she must have noticed her own slip, for she said: “I never told you the Colonel’s whole name, did I? It’s Colonel Archibald Cary. I’d like you never to mention it, though. And ’Squire Clark is named after an uncle of mine who raised me, for my parents died when I was a little girl. Clark Byng was his name, and I called the cat by the first part of it.”
Amos did not know whether interest would be considered impertinent, so he contented himself with remarking that they were “both pretty names.”
“Uncle was a good man,” said Miss Clark. “He was only five feet four in height, but very fond of muscular games, and a great admirer of tall men. Colonel Cary was six feet two. I reckon that’s about your height?”
“Exactly, ma’am,” said Amos.
She sighed slightly; then turned the conversation to Amos’s own affairs.
An instinct of delicacy kept him from ever questioning her, and she vouchsafed him no information. Once she asked him to come and see her when he wanted anything that she could give him. “I’m at home to you every day, except the third of the month,” said she. On reflection Amos remembered that it was on the third that he had paid his first visit to Miss Clark.
“Well, ma,” he remarked, walking up and down in front of his mother’s portrait in his office, as his habit was, “it is a queer case, ain’t it? But I’m not employed to run the poor old lady to cover, and I sha’n’t let any one else if I can help it.”