up in another boy's clothes and lost yourself in the snow,
didn't you? Must been a dumb one to do that. Right here in Baltimore
city where you've lived all your life. Say, was it bad in hospital? Be
you goin' to stay here? What's the lady doin'? She looks--she looks
kind of funny, don't she?"

Lionel Towsley glanced back through the window into the room he had
deserted, and his heart sank. Miss Lucy had pushed aside from the
table and was watching him with a white, disappointed face. It had
been such a little while that she had had him, and yet he had become
so dear. She had been so ready, so eager to bestow every comfort and
benefit upon him, and he had seemed so deserving; yet now, at a
glance, he was back in the old ways among his rude companions, and she
and her offered love were quite forgotten.

"Say, Tows, you're a regular swell now, ain't you? My! see them fine
clothes! Look at the pockets of 'em. Money? Money in the pockets,
Tows? Give us a nickel all round, you nabob, you. Rides in a sleigh
every day, he does, and never thinks no more of Newspaper Square and
nights on the old steam holes, he don't!" gibed Battles fiercely.

But Lionel scarcely heard this taunt. A bitter struggle was tearing
his manly, loving, loyal little heart--the claims of his old life and
his own loneliness on the one side; the claims of Miss Lucy's
generosity and her loneliness upon the other. He didn't need her, he
thought; but she needed him. She needed him very much. It was his duty
to be good to her; and, like many another child under similar
circumstances, at that moment Towsley felt that the word "duty" was
the most disagreeable one in the language. He took a second real good
look at Miss Lucy still sitting, waiting, and this time he saw
something in her face that made everything quite easy.

"She understands!" he thought, and then he nodded to her with a happy
smile. A second later, with a hurried, "Wait a minute, fellows!" he
had darted back into the breakfast-room and, now indifferent to the
stares of his comrades, flung his arms about the lady's neck, crying:

"It's all right, dear Miss Armacost! I'm not a-going to run away with
them. But I've just thought of something and I want it, I want it--oh!
so much! It's a little thing! But I want, I do want, before I give up
the newspaper business to get just one 'beat' on th' others. May I?
May I just go down to the office, and before anybody else gets hold of
it, get our ghost s