“I don’t see but that you’ve all got your Desire, after all.  The old lady is satisfied; and away up there in Hanover, what can it signify to her?  The child is ‘Daisy,’ practically, now, as long as she lives.”

The sharp, eager little gray eyes, so close together in the high, delicate head, glanced up quickly at speaker and hearer.

“What old lady, mamma, away up in Hanover?”

“Your Aunt Desire, Daisy, whom you were named for.  She lives in Hanover.  You are to go and see her there, this summer.”

“Will she call me Daisy?”

The little difficulty suggested in this question had singularly never occurred to Mrs. Ledwith before.  Miss Desire Ledwith never came down to Boston; there was no danger at home.

“No.  She is old-fashioned, and doesn’t like pet names.  She will call you Desire.  That is your name, you know.”

“Would it signify if she thought you called me Daisy?” asked the child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own manufacture.

“Well, perhaps she might not exactly understand.  People always went by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does.  She was very particular about having you called for her, and you are, you know.  I always write ‘Desire Ledwith’ in all your books, and—­well, I always shall write it so, and so will you.  But you can be Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as Florence is Flossie.”

“No, I can’t,” said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and dropping her doll.  “Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover, is thinking all the time that there is a little Desire Ledwith growing up down here.  I don’t mean to have her cheated.  I’m going to went by my name, as she did.  Don’t call me Daisy any more, all of you; for I shan’t come!”

The gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it were.  Desire Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere behind it there had been struck fire.

She was true to that through all the years after; going to school with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths,—­not a girl she knew but had a pretty modern name,—­and they all wondering at that stiff little “Desire” of hers that she would go by.  When she was twelve years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand in her room,—­a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.

Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day after that.  Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other reply in her face, or else.

“You might please your mother now, I think,” said Mrs. Megilp.  “There is no old lady to be troubled by it.”

“A promise isn’t ever dead, Mrs. Megilp,” said Desire, briefly.  “I shall keep our words.”