“Huh?” said Jacky.  However, under the spell of his gifts he became quite conversational; he said that one of these here automobiles drooled a lot of oil.  “An’ it ran into the gutter.  An’ say, Mr. Curtis, I saw a rainbow in a puddle.  An’ say, it was handsome.”  After that he got out his locomotive and its cars.  Maurice mended a broken switch for him, and then they laid the tracks on the kitchen floor, and the big father and the little son pushed the train under a table; that was a roundhouse, Maurice told Jacky. ("Why don’t they have a square house?” Jacky said); and beneath the lounge—­which was a tunnel, the bigger boy announced ("What is a tunnel?” said Jacky)—­and over Lily’s ironing board stretched between two stools; “That’s a trestle.” ("What grows trestles?” Jacky demanded.) Exercise, and a bombardment of questions, brought the perspiration out on Maurice’s forehead.  He took off his coat, and arranged the tracks so that the switches would stop derailing trains.  In the midst of it the door opened, and Jacky said, sighing, “Maw.”

Lily came in, smiling and good-natured, and very red-faced with the fatigue of carrying a hideous leprous-leaved begonia she had bought; but when she saw the intimacy of the railroad, she frowned.  “He’ll wear out his pants, crawling round that way,” she said, sharply.  “Now, you get up, Jacky, and don’t be bothering Mr. Curtis.”

“He brung me two presents.  I like presents.  Mr. Curtis, does God eat stars?”

“God doesn’t eat,” Maurice said, amused; “I’d say ‘brought,’ instead of ‘brung,’ if I were you.”

“Hasn’t He got any mouth?” Jacky said, appalled.

“Well, no,” Maurice began (entering that path of unanswerable questions in which all parents are ordained to walk); “You see, God—­why, God, He hasn’t any mouth.  He—­”

“Has He got a beak?” Jacky said, intensely interested.

“Lily, for Heaven’s sake,” Maurice implored, “doesn’t he ever stop?”

“Never,” said Lily, resignedly, “except when he’s asleep.  And nobody can answer him.  But I wish he’d let up on God.  I tell him whatever pops into my head.  When it comes to God, I guess one thing ’s as true as another.  Anyway, nobody can prove it ain’t.”

Just as Maurice was going away, his theological son detained him by a little clutch at his coat.  “I’ll give you a present next time you come,” Jacky said, shyly.

Even the hope of a present did not lure Maurice out to Maple Street very soon.  But it was self-preservation, as well as fear of discovery, which kept him away.  “If I saw much of him I might—­well, get kind of fond of the little beggar.”

The same thought may have occurred to Lily; at any rate, when, four weeks later, Jacky’s father came again; she didn’t welcome him in quite her old, sweet, hospitable way; but Jacky welcomed him!...  Jacky knew his mother as his slave; he showed her an absent-minded affection when he wanted to get anything out of her; but he knew Mr. Curtis as “The Man”—­the man who “ordered him round,” to be sure, but who gave him presents and who,—­Jacky boasted to some of his gutter companions,—­“could spit two feet farther than the p’leesman.”