was thinking of it in the Pennsylvania Station.... He remembered that he used to pull her curls and that she'd pretend to cry and then kiss him, and then they'd both laugh, and laugh. It was always a great joke. And then she'd look at the clock and fry potatoes and meat over a smelly stove, and say, "Now laugh! Paw's coming home. He needs all our laughs!" 

 "John dear!" said Cecilia. Johnny forgot the past, and swelled. Cecilia's use of his name made him feel a man. 

 "Mister, will yuh please attend to this here baggage?" he heard his father say. 

 "Don't call him 'Mister,'" he corrected Jeremiah in an undertone. Cecilia stepped from them to a group nearby. 

 "Good-bye, Marjory," John heard her say. "Yes, I will come to see you. You'll come to my house, too?"  She turned to a rather more cool looking young person, and added less surely, "I would love to have you, too, Miss Annette, if you'd care to come." 

 "I'm rather busy——" John heard the Annette person reply. Then he saw her turn away from Cecilia. His heart grew hot.  "If I don't see you again," said Cecilia, "I wish you the happiest kind of a Christmas!"  Annette did not reply.  The Marjory girl kissed Cecilia twice.  "Good-bye, little Saint," she called after Cecilia.  "I'm coming to see you to-morrow!" 

 In the motor there was a pause for inspection. "Yuh look so different," said Jeremiah rather wistfully. 

 "My heart is just the same," said Cecilia. "It will always be the same."  She kissed Jeremiah Madden after her words and then leaned forward and kissed Johnny. He didn't mind, none of the fellows being present. Then they were silent, for when hearts are very full they are liable to wiggle up into throats and choke people when they try to talk. At last they were out of the crowded streets and on broad ones, where other cars, taking people pleasure-bent, rolled past them. 

 Then the house. The house from which Cecilia had gone last September, wearing a suit all over buttons, with a touch of "tasty" red here and there. 

 "Norah, darling Norah!" said Cecilia. Norah's red arms drew her close, then, quite in Norah's way, she eclipsed behind a blue-checked apron, and sobbed loudly. Cecilia looked about the hall. There was some new furniture. A hat-rack that was evidently the work of a lunatic with the unrestrained use of a jig-saw. 

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