"You ought to sit in the parlor, Dad," said Lydia, reproachfully.
"Oh, hello, young Lydia!" said the tall man. "Come here and let me look at you."
Levine drew the child to his knee. She looked with a clear affectionate gaze on his thin smooth-shaven face, and into his tired black eyes.
"Why do you always say 'young' Lydia?" asked the child.
"That's what I want to know, too," agreed Amos.
"Because, by heck! she's so young to be such an old lady." He smoothed the short curly hair with a gesture that was indescribably gentle. "I tell you what, young Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
Lydia leaned against his knee and took a large bite of cake. "You'd take me traveling, wouldn't you, Mr. Levine?" she said, comfortably.
"You bet I would, and you should have your heart's desire, whatever that might be. If any one deserves it you do, young Lydia."
Amos nodded and Lydia looked at them both with a sort of puzzled content as she munched her cake.
"I brought a newly illustrated copy of 'Tom Sawyer' for you to see, Lydia," said Levine. "Keep it as long as you want to. It's over on the couch there."
Lydia threw herself headlong on the book and the two men returned to the conversation she had interrupted.
"My loan from Marshall comes due in January," said Amos. "My lord, I've got to do something."
"What made you get so much?" asked Levine.
"A thousand dollars? I told you at the time, I sorta lumped all my outstanding debts with the doctor's bill and funeral expenses and borrowed enough to cover."
"He's a skin, Marshall is. Why does he live on this street except to save money?"
Lydia looked up from "Tom Sawyer." There were two little lines of worry between her eyes and the little sick sense in the pit of her stomach that always came when she heard money matters discussed. Her earliest recollection was of her mother frantically striving to devise some method of meeting their latest loan.
"I'd like to get enough ahead to buy a little farm. All my folks were farmers back in New Hampshire and I was a fool ever to have quit it. It looked like a mechanic could eat a farmer up, though, when I was a young fellow. Now a little farm looks good enough to me. But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--" Amos sighed.