She laughed outright. “That is what most of us are, Sonny, good except when we are bad, or bad except when we are good.”
“Are you bad sometimes?” he demanded, with a wondering look.
“Very often, I’m afraid; but I get good again as soon as I can, because being bad is horrid.” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if to emphasize the discomfort of the condition.
“Fader isn’t ever bad,” the boy remarked, with a pitying look at Gertrude as if he were very sorry for her.
“That is very nice,” she answered. Then she immediately absorbed him in a game of cat’s-cradle, being fearful lest he should begin to cry if allowed time to think about his father’s perfections just now.
But Sonny was laughing merrily at his success in cat’s-cradle when a little later his father re-entered the car.
“Look, fader, Sonny can do it most beautiful!” he shouted gleefully, insisting on going through the whole performance again in order that his father might witness his cleverness.
“It was kind of you to look after the laddie,” the young man said to Gertrude. “A doctor is never quite like other men, you see, and he must go where he is wanted regardless of everything, so Sonny has to be left occasionally.”
“I hope it was not a serious case,” she said, more from politeness than from any special interest in the man who had been hurt.
“No; only a flesh cut, although rather a deep one. The old man, evidently a countryman and a bit of a tartar, boarded the cars with two others at Blakeson’s Ferry—that was where you came on too, I believe. He commenced finding fault with his companions, and kept it up until one of them struck at him with a sharp-edged tin mug, and gave him a nasty cut over the eye.”