The geraniums arrived in a small cart the next morning, but O’Hara did not appear, and for several weeks, though Gabriella glanced suspiciously at the hatrack each morning when she passed through the hail, there was no sign of life in his rooms.  Then one afternoon he reappeared as suddenly as he had vanished, and she found Archibald with him in the yard when she came home at six o’clock.  That the boy would be her difficulty, she knew by instinct, for he had been seized by one of those unaccountable romantic fancies to which the young of the race are disposed.  Though the sentiment was certainly far less dangerous than Fanny’s passion for the, matinée idol, since it revealed itself principally as a robust and wholly masculine ambition to follow in the footsteps of adventure, Gabriella fought it almost as fiercely as she had fought Fanny’s incipient love affair.

“He is making Archibald rough,” she said to Miss Polly, after a fortnight of unavailing opposition to the new influence in Archibald’s life.  “Until we came here,” she added despondently, “Archibald loved me better than anything in the world, and now he seems to think of nothing but this man.”

“It looks to me as if it was mighty good for the child, honey.  You can’t keep a boy tied to your apron-strings all the time.  Archibald needs a father the same as other boys, and if he hasn’t got one, he’s either goin’ to break loose or he’s goin’ to become a mollycoddle.  You don’t want to make a mollycoddle of him, do you?”

“Of course not,” answered Gabriella honestly, for, in spite of her strange fits of unreasonableness, she was still sensible enough in theory.  “I’ve tried hard to keep him manly—­not to spoil him, you know that as well as I do.  And it isn’t that I object to his making friends.  I’d give anything in the world if he could know Arthur.  If it had been Arthur,” she went on gently, “I should have been glad to have him come first.  I shouldn’t have cared a bit if he had loved Arthur better than me.”

“You oughtn’t to talk like that, Gabriella, for you know just as well as can be that Archibald don’t love anybody better than he loves you.  As far as I can make out though, Mr. O’Hara sets him a real good example.  I don’t see that he’s doin’ the child a particle of harm, and I don’t believe you see it either.  To be sure you don’t think much of football, but it’s a long ways better than loafin’ round with nothin’ to do, and this boy scout business that Archibald talks so much about sounds all right to me.  Now, he never would have thought a thing about that except for Mr. O’Hara.”

“Yes, that’s all right.  I approve of that, but I can’t help hating to see a stranger get so strong an influence over my son.  It isn’t fair of him.”

“Then why don’t you tell him to stop it.  I believe he’d be sensible about it, and if I was you, I’d have it every bit out with him.”

“If it doesn’t stop, I’ll find some way of showing him that I object to the friendship.  But, after all, it may be only a fancy of Archibald’s.  Anyhow, I’ll wait a while before I take any step.”