Mr. Wriford tells her: "It's very nice of you to be glad about it."
"Why, of course I'm glad," cries Essie. "That's just finished up my day a treat! Now you won't half enjoy the things I've brought home for supper from my young lady friends. I was afraid—oh, you don't know what it is to have a lodger about the house when he's lost his job! They're fair cautions, lodgers are, when they've got the sack!"
And later in the evening, when he sees Essie sitting and looking before her with her eyes smiling and her lips twitching, she suddenly looks up, and catching his gaze, reveals that it is of him she is thinking. "You weren't half in the dumps, though, were you?" she says. "Isn't it funny, though, when a thing's turned out A1, to look back and see what a state you were in? Isn't it, though? Let's have a laugh!"
CHAPTER VI
THE VACANT CORNER
I
The morrow finds eager pupils awaiting Mr. Wriford, and eager work and eager play, and again in the evening he is returning to the plumber's shop occupied with the plans for the next day thrown up by these new developments.
So it is also on the following day, and so the next, and so by day and day and week and week. Interestedly and swiftly the time in these preoccupations passes. He is quite surprised to find one evening that weeks to the number of half the term have gone. Captain of the School Abbot brings it to his notice; and on arrival at Tower House next morning Mr. Wriford brings it, together with Abbot's reason for mentioning it, to the notice of Mr. Pennyquick.
Mr. Wriford knocks on the study door, waits for the "One moment! One moment!" which is called to him and which gives a chinking of glass in suggestion of the fact that the Headmaster is putting away the medicine bottles, exhibition of which, as an Open-air Man, is so distasteful to him, and then enters to find the Open-air Man lying, as usual, on the sofa, amidst an air that appears to have escaped from beneath a cork rather than have come from the window.
Mr. Wriford expresses the hope that he is better, Mr. Pennyquick the fear that he is not, and there is then brought forward the suggestion advanced by Abbot.