“My soul and body!” said Lily, following him to the door; “that boy gets ’round everybody!  Well, what do you suppose?  I go to church with him!  Ain’t that rich?  Me!  He don’t like church—­though he’s crazy about the music.  But I take him.  And I don’t have to listen to what the man says.  I just plan out the food for a week.  Sometimes,”—­her amber eyes were lovely with anxiously pondering love—­“sometimes I don’t know but what I’ll make a preacher of him?  Some preachers marry money, and get real gentlemanly.  And then again I think I’d rather have him a clubman.  But, anyway, I’m savin’ up every last cent to educate him!”

“He’s worth it,” Maurice said, and there was pride in his voice; “yes, we must—­I mean, you must educate him.”

On his way home, stopping to buy some flowers for his wife, Maurice found himself thinking of Jacky as a boy ... as a mighty bright boy, who must be educated.  As—­his boy!

“You forgot the day,” he challenged Eleanor, good-naturedly, when he handed her the violets.

She said, briefly, “No; I hadn’t forgotten.”

The pain in her worn face made him wince....  But he was able to forget it in thinking of the toys he had ordered for Jacky on the way home.  “I’d like to see him playing with them,” he said to himself, reflecting upon the track, and the engine, and the very expensive wonder of a tiny snow plow.  But he didn’t yield to the impulse to see the boy for a month.  For one thing, he was afraid to.  The recollection of that day when Lily’s doorstep had been the edge of a volcano still made him shiver; and as Eleanor had briefly but definitely refused to take her usual “vacation” at Green Hill without him, there was no time when he could be sure that she would not wander out to Medfield!  So it was not until one August afternoon, when he knew that she was going to a concert, that he went to Maple Street.  But first he bought a top;—­and just as he was leaving the office, he went back and rummaged in a pigeonhole in his desk and found a tiny gilt hatchet; “it will amuse him,” he thought, cynically.

Lily was not at home; but Jacky was sitting on the back doorstep, twanging his jew’s-harp.  He was shy at first, and tongue-tied; then wildly excited on learning that there were “presents” in Mr. Curtis’s pocket.  When the top was produced, he dropped his jew’s-harp to watch it spin on a string held between Maurice’s hands; then he devoted himself to the hatchet, and chopped his father’s knee, energetically.  “Pity there’s no cherry tree round,” said Maurice; “Look here, Jacobus, I want you always to tell the truth.  Understand?”