Then they parted, and he went out into the cold, with a strange warmth like the fire of youth at his heart, while she ran eagerly up the uncarpeted stairs to the nursery.

The trunks were packed, the boxes were nailed down, and the two children were playing shipwreck while they ate a supper of bread and milk at a table made from the bare top of a packing-case.  Several days before the nurse had left without warning, and Miss Polly sat now, in hat and mantle, on one of the little beds which would be taken down the next day and sent over to the apartment on the West Side.

“I’ve been to the Carolina and unpacked the things that had come,” she said at Gabriella’s entrance.  “Those rooms ain’t so bad as New York rooms go; but it does seem funny, don’t it, to cook in the same kitchen with a lot of strangers you never laid eyes on befo’?  I br’iled some chops for the children right alongside of an old maid who had come all the way up from New Orleans to study music—­imagine, at her age!  Why, she couldn’t be a day under fifty!  And on the other side there was the mother of a girl who’s at the art school, or whatever you call it, where they teach you paintin’.  They are from somewhere up yonder in New England and their home folks had sent ’em a pumpkin pie.  She gave me a slice of it, but I never did think much of pumpkin.  It can’t hold a candle to sweet potato pudding, and I wouldn’t let the children touch it for fear it might set too heavy in the night.  I ain’t got much use for Yankee food, nohow.”

“I hope the place is perfectly sanitary,” was Gabriella’s anxious rejoinder.  “The front room gets some sunshine in the afternoon, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a horrid street.  I don’t want to live there,” wailed Fanny, who had rebelled from the beginning against her fallen fortunes.  “I got my white shoes dirty, and there were banana peels all about.  A man has a fruit-stand in the bottom of our house.  Don’t let’s go there to live, mother.”

“You’ll have to wear black shoes now, darling, and you mustn’t mind the fruit-stand.  It will be a good place to buy oranges.”

“I like it,” said Archibald stoutly.  “I like to slide on banana peels, and I like the man.  He has black eyes and a red handkerchief in his pocket.  Will you buy me a red handkerchief, mamma?  He has a boy, too.  I saw him.  He can skate on roller skates, and the boy has a dog and the dog has a black ear.  May I have roller skates for my birthday, and a dog—­a small one—­and may I ask the boy up to play with me?”

“But the boy is ugly and so is the dog.  I hate ugly people,” complained Fanny.

“I like ugly people,” retorted Archibald, glowering, not from anger, but from earnestness.  “Ugly people are nicer than pretty ones, aren’t they, mamma?  Pang is nicer than Fanny.”

He was always like that even as a baby, always on the side of the unfortunate, always fighting valiantly for the under dog.  With his large head, his grotesque spectacles, and his pouting lips, he bore a curious resemblance to a brownie, yet when one observed him closely, one saw that there was a remarkable blending of strength and sweetness in his expression.