the likes o' me to be behavin' that
foolish!" She put on additional dignity. "I will always be the Widow
Riley." Then relaxing again into sweetness: "Marridge is a lottery, Mr.
Richlin'; indeed an' it is; and ye know mighty well that he ye're after
joking me about is no more nor a fri'nd." She looked sweet enough for
somebody to kiss.

"I don't know so certainly about that," said her visitor, stepping down
upon the sidewalk and putting on his hat. "If I may judge by"-- He
paused and glanced at the window.

"Ah, now, Mr. Richlin', na-na-now, Mr. Richlin', ye daurn't say ud! Ye
daurn't!" She smiled and blushed and arched her neck and rose and sank
upon herself with sweet delight.

"I say if I may judge by what he has said to me," insisted Richling.

Mrs. Riley glided down across the door-step, and, with all the
insinuation of her sex and nation, demanded:--

"What'd he tell ye? Ah! he didn't tell ye nawthing! Ha, ha! there wasn'
nawthing to tell!" But Richling slipped away.

Mrs. Riley shook her finger: "Ah, ye're a wicket joker, Mr. Richlin'. I
didn't think that o' the likes of a gintleman like you, anyhow!" She
shook her finger again as she withdrew into the house, smiling broadly
all the way in to the cradle, where she kissed and kissed again her
ruddy, chubby, sleeping boy.

* * *

Ristofalo came often. He was a man of simple words, and of few thoughts
of the kind that were available in conversation; but his personal
adventures had begun almost with infancy, and followed one another in
close and strange succession over lands and seas ever since. He could
therefore talk best about himself, though he talked modestly. "These
things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline," and there came times
when even a tear was not wanting to gem the poetry of the situation.

"And ye might have saved yerself from all that," was sometimes her note
of sympathy. But when he asked how she silently dried her eyes.

Sometimes his experiences had been intensely ludicrous, and Mrs. Riley
would laugh until in pure self-oblivion she smote her thigh with her
palm, or laid her hand so smartly against his shoulder as to tip him
half off his seat.

"Ye didn't!"

"Yes."

"Ah! Get out wid ye, Raphael Ristofalo,--to be telling me that for the
trooth!"

At one such time she was about to give him a second push, but he took
the hand in his, and quietly kept it to the end of his story.

He lingered late that even