An Old Chester Secret

THERE was not a person in Old Chester less tainted by the vulgarity of secretiveness than Miss Lydia Sampson. She had no more reticence than sunshine or wind, or any other eleme...

AS for Johnny's mother, she kept on thinking, too, but she yielded, for the moment, to the inevitableness of her harvest. And of course the devotion, and the invitations to Phil...

JOHNNY would have had his gun right off, and many other things, too, if Miss Lydia hadn't interfered. "Please don't send him so many presents," she wrote Mrs. Robertson in her s...

DURING the first year that the "Smith" baby lived outside the brick wall of Mr. Smith's place, the iron gates of the driveway were not opened, because business obliged Mr. Smith...

It was curious that she had no misgiving as to what she was doing in thus closing the door of opportunity to Johnny--for of course, the new Mr. Smith's protection would mean eve...

AFTER Mr. Smith's death the Robertsons stayed on in Old Chester to close the house. Mary hardly left it, even to walk in the garden behind the circling brick wall. But she sent...

"My dear!" her husband protested, "if you got him under your own roof you wouldn't be able to hold on to yourself! I could, but you couldn't. You'd tell him."