Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/223

 "Well, I 'll have some fresh pound-cake and currant-loaf for him," said the placid apostle of materialism, from the doorway, as she went back to her jam-making.

Lonely ate supper with the Sampsons, accordingly, in his best black clothes, with his hair plastered decorously down over his ears, and a quaver of emotional tension in his more carefully modulated voice. Indeed, such a settled smile of meek and wistful melancholy played about his features that Lionel Clarence demanded to know what was making him such a stiff, and had lurking suspicions that Lonely had been eating Bordeaux Mixture again off the Gubtills' gooseberry bushes.

The Preacher's son thought that this supper was to be a rare treat, and that, being the official recognition of his newly found chum, it would find Lonely in his lightest and most engaging vein.

Never was boy more doomed to bitter disappointment.

It is true that Lonely did ample though somewhat uneasy justice to the chocolate icecream, to the currant-loaf and the pound-cake,