you what I'll do. I'll buy you a real wax one with
yellow hair and blue eyes. I saw one in a show-window as I came along
just now. It had on shoes and stockings and held a parasol in its little
hand."

"All talk--all wind, hot air!" the child said, indifferently, and she
had evidently picked up the expressions from her elders. "A drummer--the
fellow with the striped shirts that is always whistling and sells
cloaks--he told me he was going to get me a doll and a baby-carriage,
but he never came back--changed his rowt, so Aunt Jane said. But this
doll's all right. Don't you think so, brother John?"

"It will do till I get the other," he answered, and then he felt an
impulse that he had never felt before. He bent down and put his hand
caressingly on the almost matted hair, and she, not understanding,
impatiently shook it off and went on with her work, her mouth now full
of pins.

There was a chair near by and he sat down in it, bending toward the
child. Seldom had his boyishness been so apparent. He wanted to open his
cramped heart to some one--why not to her? He wanted to hear his own
voice applauding the things that were leaping, singing, shouting in the
penetralia of his being.

"Say, Dora," he began, clasping his warm hands between his knees, "can
you keep a secret?"

"A secret?" she repeated, letting her doll lie for an instant in her
ragged lap and staring straight at him with growing interest. "Have you
got one--a real one?"

He had. His smile and generous nod admitted it. "Can you keep your mouth
shut, that is what I want to know?"

"Yes, yes!" she exclaimed, eagerly. "You ask Aunt Jane if I ever let
your ma know--let her know--but never mind. I can keep one. Try me--that
is if you are not kidding. I don't want any foolishness from you or
anybody else. Life is too short."

"Well, listen!" he began, and something in the blaze of his eyes, the
tremolo of his erstwhile brusk voice, the warm look of his face, caught
and held her attention. "Did you ever think the day would come when I'd
go with a girl?"

"Who, you?" Dora sniffed. "Now I _know_ you are kidding."

"No, I'm not," he went on, riding the tide of his joyous self-emptying.
"I have done it often since I went to Cranston. I got acquainted with
one up there. Sam and I board with her pa and ma. You ought to see her,
Dora. She is all right--as nice and pretty as any stuck-up girl in this
town. Folks up there are different--very, very different from t