nformed him carelessly. "Florence goes over
to grandpa's after dark and sits on the ground up against the porch and
listens."

Noble first looked startled then uneasily reminiscent. "I don't believe
Florence ought to do that," he said gravely.

"_I_ wouldn't do it!" Herbert was emphatic.

"That's right, Herbert. I'm glad you wouldn't."

"No, sir," the manly boy declared. "You wouldn't never catch _me_ takin'
my death o' cold sittin' on the damp grass in the night air just to
listen to a lot o' tooty-tooty about 'I've named a star for you,' and
all such. You wouldn't catch me----"

Noble partly concealed a sudden anguish. "Who?" he interrupted. "Who did
she say _that_ to?"

"She didn't. They say it to her, and she says? 'Oh, you don't mean
that!' and of course then they haf to go on and say some more. Florence
says----" He checked himself. "Oh, I forgot! I promised Florence I
wouldn't tell anything about all this."

"It's safe," Noble assured him quickly. "I'm quite a friend of
Florence's and it's absolutely safe with me. I won't speak of it to
anybody, Herbert. Who was it told her he'd named a star for her?"

"It was the way some ole poem began. Newland Sanders wrote it. Florence
found it under Aunt Julia's sofa-cushions and read it all through, but
_I_ wouldn't wade through all that tooty-tooty for a million dollars,
and I told her to put it back before Aunt Julia noticed. Well, about
every day he writes her a fresh one, and then in the evening he stays
later than the rest, and reads 'em to her--and you ought to hear grandpa
when _he_ gets to talkin' about it!"

"He's perfectly right," said Noble. "Perfectly! What does he say when he
talks about it, Herbert?"

"Oh, he says all this and that; and then he kind of mutters around, and
you can't tell just what all the words are exactly, so't he can deny it
if any o' the family accuses him of swearing or anything." And Herbert
added casually: "He was kind of goin' on like that about you, night
before last."

"About _me_! Why, what could he say about _me_?"

"Oh, all this and that."

"But what did he find to say?"

"Well, he heard her tellin' you how you oughtn't to smoke so many
cigarettes and all about how it was killin' you, and you sayin' you
guessed it wouldn't matter if you _did_ die, and Aunt Julia sayin' 'Oh,
you don't mean that,' and all this and such and so on, you know. He can
hear anything on the porch pretty good from the lib'ary; and Florence