"If you puts out your tongue at me again--! What do yer say?

"She was twice bigger than you. You ain't got no hair, nor yet no teeth.
You're the littlest I ever seed. Eh? Don't not speak then, sulks!"

Prudence had kept him away from the other girl, but he was feeling a
great want: someone to applaud him. When we grow older we call it
sympathy. How Reddy (as he called her because she had beautiful
red-brown hair) had appreciated him! She had a way he liked of opening
her eyes very wide when she looked at him. Oh, what a difference from
that thing in the back of the bed!

Not the mere selfish desire to see her again, however, would take him in
quest of Reddy. He was one of those superior characters, was Tommy, who
got his pleasure in giving it, and therefore gave it. Now, Reddy was a
worthy girl. In suspecting her of overreaching him he had maligned her:
she had taken what he offered, and been thankful. It was fitting that he
should give her a treat: let her see him again.

His mother was at last re-engaged by her old employers, her supplanter
having proved unsatisfactory, and as the work lay in a distant street,
she usually took the kid with her, thus leaving no one to spy on Tammy's
movements. Reddy's reward for not playing him false, however, did not
reach her as soon as doubtless she would have liked, because the first
two or three times he saw her she was walking with the lady of his
choice, and of course he was not such a fool as to show himself. But he
walked behind them and noted with satisfaction that the lady seemed to
be reconciled to her lot and inclined to let bygones be bygones; when
at length Reddy and her patron met, Tommy thought this a good sign too,
that Ma-ma (as she would call the lady) had told her not to go farther
away than the lamp-post, lest she should get lost again. So evidently
she had got lost once already, and the lady had been sorry. He asked
Reddy many shrewd questions about how Ma-ma treated her, and if she got
the top of the Sunday egg and had the licking of the pan and wore
flannel underneath and slept at the back; and the more he inquired, the
more clearly he saw that he had got her one of the right kind.

Tommy arranged with her that she should always be on the outlook for him
at the window, and he would come sometimes, and after that they met
frequently, and she proved a credit to him, gurgling with mirth at his
tales of Thrums, and pinching him when he had finished, to make su