’What he does not spend for us he puts aside.  He is trying to save enough to go to the High School, but it’s slow work.  I can do but little myself, and it all falls upon Harold.’

’But I like it, grandma.  I like to work for you and Jerry, and I have almost twenty dollars saved,’ Harold said, ’and in a year or two I can go away to school, and work somewhere for my board.  Lots of boys do that.’

Arthur was hitching his pony to the fence, while a new idea was dawning in his mind.

‘Fifty cents a day,’ he said to himself, ’and he has twenty dollars saved, and thinks himself rich.  Why, I’ve spent more than that on one bottle of wine, and here is this boy, Amy’s son, wanting an education, and working to support his grandmother like a common laborer.  I believe I am crazy.’

He was in the cottage by this time—­in the clean, cool kitchen where the supper table was laid with its plain fair, most unlike the costly viands which daily loaded his board.

‘Don’t wait for me, Harold must be hungry,’ he said, adding quickly:  ’Or stay, if you will permit me, I will take a cup of tea with you.  The drive has given me an appetite, and your tea smells very inviting.’

It was a great honor to have Arthur Tracy at her table, and Mrs. Crawford felt it as such, and was very sorry, too, that she had nothing better to offer him than bread and butter and radishes, with milk, and a dish of cold beans, and chopped beets, and a piece of apple pie saved for Harold from dinner.  But she made him welcome, and Jerry, delighted to return the hospitality she had received, brought him a clean plate and cup and saucer, and asked if she might get the best sugar-bowl and the white sugar.  Then, remembering the beautiful flowers which had adorned the table at Tracy Park, she ran out and gathering a bunch of June pinks, put them in a little glass by his plate.

When all was ready and they had taken their seats at the table, Mrs. Crawford closed her eyes reverently and asked the accustomed blessing which in that house preceded every meal.  Jerry’s amen was a good deal louder and more emphatic than usual, while she nodded her head to Arthur, with an expression which he understood to mean, ’You know now what you ought to say, instead of that long prayer,’ and he nodded back that he did so understand it.

Arthur enjoyed the supper immensely, or pretended that he did.  He ate three slices of bread and butter; he drank three cups of tea; he even tried the beans and the beets, but declined the radishes, which, he said, would give him the nightmare.

When supper was over and the table cleared away, he still showed no signs of going, but asking Mrs. Crawford to take a seat near him, he plunged at once into the business which had brought him there, and which, since he had seen Harold in his working-dress and heard what he was trying to do, had grown to be of a two-fold nature.  He was very lonely, he said, and all the elegance and luxuriousness of his handsome house failed to give him pleasure or to make him forget the past.  He wanted some one to love who would love him in return, and the little taste he had had of Jerry’s society had made him wish for more, and he must have her with him a part at least of every day.