ess,
they found themselves lingering after the business was over to talk with
one who, in everything save money, was their equal.

Harold was his grandmother's idol. For him she toiled and worked,
feeling more than repaid for all she did by his love and devotion to
her. And Harold was a noble little fellow, full of manly instincts, and
always ready to deny himself for the sake of others. That he and his
grandmother were poor he knew, but he had never felt the effects of
their poverty, save when Tom Tracy had jeered at him for it, and called
him a pauper. There had been one square fight between the two boys, in
which Harold had been the victor, with only a torn jacket, while Tom's
eye had been black for a week, and Mrs. Tracy had gone to the cottage to
complain and insist that Harold should be punished. But when she heard
that Dick St. Claire had assisted in the fray, taking Harold's part, and
himself dealing Tom the blow which blackened his eye, she changed her
tactics, for she did not care to quarrel with Mrs. Arthur St. Claire, of
Grassy Spring.

Harold and Richard St. Claire, or Dick, as he was familiarly called,
were great friends, and if the latter knew there was a difference
between himself and the child of poverty he never manifested it, and
played far oftener with Harold than with Tom, whose domineering
disposition and rough manners were distasteful to him. That Harold would
one day be obliged to earn his living, Mrs. Crawford knew, but he was
still too young for anything of that kind; and when Grace Atherton, or
Mrs. St. Claire offered him money for the errands he sometimes did for
them, she steadily refused to let him take it. Had she known of Mrs.
Tracy's proposition that he should be present at the party as hall-boy,
she would have declined, for though she could go there herself as an
employee, she shrank from suffering Harold to do so. That Mrs. Tracy was
not a lady, she knew, and in her heart there was always a feeling of
superiority to the woman even while she served her, and she was not as
sorry, perhaps, as she ought to have been, for the attack of rheumatism
which would prevent her from going to the park to take charge of the
kitchen during the evening.

'I am sorry to disappoint her, but I am glad not to be there,' she was
thinking to herself as she sat in her bright, cheerful kitchen, waiting
for Harold, when he burst in upon her, exclaiming:

'Oh, grandma, only think! I am invited to the party,