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The fact that she was speaking of her husband did not shock the boy’s moral sense in the least. The sacredness of those relations, and even of blood kinship, is, I fear, not always so clear to the youthful mind as we fondly imagine. That Mr. Burroughs was a bad man to have excited this change in this lovely woman was Leonidas’s only conclusion. He remembered how his sister’s soft, pretty little kitten, purring on her lap, used to get its back up and spit at the postmaster’s yellow hound.

“I never wished to come unless you called me first,” he said frankly.

“What?” she said, in her half playful, half reproachful, but wholly caressing way. “You mean to say you would never come to see me unless I sent for you? Oh, Leon! and you’d abandon me in that way?”

But Leonidas was set in his own boyish superstition. “I’d just delight in being sent for by you any time, Mrs. Burroughs, and you kin always find me,” he said shyly, but doggedly; “but”– He stopped.

“What an opinionated young gentleman! Well, I see I must do all the courting. So consider that I sent for you this morning. I’ve got another letter for you to mail.” She put her hand to her breast, and out of the pretty frillings of her frock produced, as before, with the same faint perfume of violets, a letter like the first. But it was unsealed. “Now, listen, Leon; we are going to be great friends–you and I.” Leonidas felt his cheeks glowing. “You are going to do me another great favor, and we are going to have a little fun and a great secret all by our own selves. Now, first, have you any correspondent–you know–any one who writes to you–any boy or girl–from San Francisco?”

Leonidas’s cheeks grew redder–alas! from a less happy consciousness. He never received any letters; nobody ever wrote to him. He was obliged to make this shameful admission.

Mrs. Burroughs looked thoughtful. “But you have some friend in San Francisco–some one who MIGHT write to you?” she suggested pleasantly.

“I knew a boy once who went to San Francisco,” said Leonidas doubtfully. “At least, he allowed he was goin’ there.”

“That will do,” said Mrs. Burroughs. “I suppose your parents know him or of him?”

“Why,” said Leonidas, “he used to live here.”

“Better still. For, you see, it wouldn’t be strange if he DID write. What was the gentleman’s name?”

“Jim Belcher,” returned Leonidas hesitatingly, by no means sure that the absent Belcher knew how to write. Mrs. Burroughs took a tiny pencil from her belt, opened the letter she was holding in her hand, and apparently wrote the name in it. Then she folded it and sealed it, smiling charmingly at Leonidas’s puzzled face.

“Now, Leon, listen; for here is the favor I am asking. Mr. Jim Belcher”–she pronounced the name with great gravity–“will write to you in a few days. But inside of YOUR letter will be a little note to me, which you will bring me. You can show your letter to your family, if they want to know who it is from; but no one must see MINE. Can you manage that?”

“Yes,” said Leonidas. Then, as the whole idea flashed upon his quick intelligence, he smiled until he showed his dimples. Mrs. Burroughs leaned forward over the fence, lifted his torn straw hat, and dropped a fluttering little kiss on his forehead. It seemed to the boy, flushed and rosy as a maid, as if she had left a shining star there for every one to see.

“Don’t smile like that, Leon, you’re positively irresistible! It will be a nice little game, won’t it? Nobody in it but you and me– and Belcher! We’ll outwit them yet. And, you see, you’ll be obliged to come to me, after all, without my asking.”