"Of course I should," he said, and learned as he went along, that she carried milk twice a day for a farmer's wife.
"Does the young lady come to see her godson sometimes?"
"Ay, to be sure!" replied the woman. "She comes and the baby hasn't a frock or a petticoat that she hasn't given him. She is so good, Miss Gertrude. We were confirmed together," she added, with pride.
So her name was Gertrude.
They had still some distance to go, through narrow streets and alleys, before the woman announced that they had reached her house. "There is a light inside--perhaps it is mother, the child waked up I suppose. My mother lives up stairs," she explained, "my father is a shoemaker."
The window was so low that a child might have looked in easily, so he could overlook the whole room without difficulty.
"Stay," he whispered, holding Johanna's arm.
"O goodness! it is the young lady," she cried, "I hope she won't be angry."
But Frank Linden did not reply. He saw only the slender girlish figure, as she walked up and down with the crying child in her arms, talking to him, dancing him till at last he stopped crying, looked solemnly in her face for awhile and then began to crow.
"Now you see, you silly little goosie," sounded the clear girl's voice in his ears, "you see who comes to take care of you when, you were lying here all alone and all crumpled up, while your mother has to go out from house to house through all the wind and rain;--you naughty baby, you little rogue, do you know your name yet? Let's see. Frank,--Frankie? O such a big boy! Now come here and don't cry a bit more and you shall have on your warm little frock when your mother comes." And she sat down before the stove and began to take off the little red flannel frock.