“Aw, how do you know?” the other boys scoffed.

Jacky, evading the little matter of evidence, said, haughtily, “I know.”

When “The Man” declared that next fall Jacky was to go to school, regularly, and not according to his own sweet will, Jacky waited until he was alone with his mother to kick and scream and say he wouldn’t.  Lily slapped him, and said, “Mr. Curtis will give you a present if you’re on time every morning!”

She told Maurice to what she had committed him:  “You see, I’m bound to educate him, and make a gentleman of him, so he can have an automobile, and marry a society girl.  No chippy is going to get Jacky—­smoking cigarettes, and saying ‘La!  La!’ to any man that comes along.  I hate those cheap girls.  Look at the paint on ’em.  I don’t see how they have the face to show themselves on the street!  Well, I can’t make him prompt at school; but he’ll be Johnny-on-the-spot if you say so.  My soul and body, he’ll do anything for you!  He’s saved up all his prayer money and bought a lot of chewing gum for you.”

“Great Scott!” said Maurice, appalled at the experimental obligations which his son’s gift might involve.

“So I told him that next winter you’d give him a box of candy every Saturday if he was on time all the week.  I ain’t asking you to go to any expense,” she pleaded; “I’ll buy the candy.  But you promise him—­”

“I’ll promise him a spanking if he’s not on time, once,” Maurice retorted; “for Heaven’s sake, Lily, let up on spoiling him!”

At which Lily said:  “He’s my boy!  I guess I know how to bring him up!”

Maurice, the next morning, looking across his breakfast table at Eleanor and remembering this remark, said to himself:  “Lily needn’t worry; I don’t want him—­and I couldn’t have him if I did!  But what is going to become of him?”

His new, slowly awakening sense of responsibility expressed itself in this unanswerable question, which irritated his mind as a splinter might have irritated his flesh.  He thought of it constantly—­thought of it when Eleanor sang (with a slurred note once or twice), “O sweet, O sweet content!” Thought of it when his conscience reminded him that he must have tea with her in the garden under the poplar on Sunday afternoons.  Thought of it when he and she went up to the Houghtons’, to spend Labor Day (she would not go without him!).  Perhaps the thing that gave him some moments of forgetfulness was a quite different irritation which he felt when, on reaching Green Hill, he discovered that John Bennett, too, was spending Labor Day in the mountains.  Johnny had come he said, to see his father....  “I wouldn’t have known it if he hadn’t mentioned it!” said Doctor Bennett; for, Johnny practically lived at the Houghtons’, where Edith was so painstakingly kind to him that he was a good deal discouraged; but the two families made pleasing deductions!  Mary Houghton intimated as much to Maurice.