These stories she always related in the third person, for it would only
puzzle and grieve the child to intimate to him that there was anything in
common between the radiant girl he had been taught to call Ida and the
withered woman whom he called Aunty. What, indeed, had they in common but
their name? and it had been so long since any one had called her Ida,
that Miss Ludington scarcely felt that the name belonged to her present
self at all.
In their daily walks about the village she would tell the little boy
endless stories about incidents which had befallen Ida at this spot or
that. She was never weary of telling, or he of listening to, these tales,
and it was wonderful how the artless sympathy of the child comforted the
lone woman.
One day, when he was eight years old, finding himself alone in the
sitting-room, the lad, after contemplating Ida's picture for a long time,
piled one chair on another, and climbing upon the structure, put up his
chubby lips to the painted lips of the portrait and kissed them with
right good-will. Just then Miss Ludington came in, and saw what he was
doing.
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