The drug-seller looked after her shrewdly. He was a moral man.
Ruth, hurrying out upon the side-walk, descried the child a few paces up the road. He had come to a halt; was, in fact, plucking up his courage to go and demand the bird-cage. She overtook him.
"I was sent out to look for you," she said. "I oughtn't to have wasted time buying that ointment; but my hands were hurting me. Please, you are to come home and change your clothes for dinner."
"I'll come in a minute," said Dicky, "if you'll stand here and wait."
He might be called by that word again; and without knowing why, he dreaded her hearing it. She waited while he trotted forward, nerving himself to face the crowd again. Lo! when he reached the booth, all the bystanders had melted away. The bird-seller was covering up his cages with loose wrappers, making ready to pack up for the night.
"Hello!" he said cheerfully. "Thought I'd lost you for good."
He took the child's money and handed the canary cage across the sill; also the bird-whistle, wrapped in a scrap of paper. Many times in the course of a career which brought him much fighting and some little fame, Dicky Vyell remembered this his first lesson in courage—that if you walk straight up to an enemy, as likely as not you find him vanished.
But he had not quite reached the end of his alarms. As he took the cage, a parrot at the back of the booth uplifted his voice and squawked,—
"No prerogative! No prerogative! No prerogative!"
"You mustn't mind him," said the bird-seller genially. "He's like the crowd—picks up a cry an' harps on it without understandin'."