The trouble was that when he looked at it, he was apt to continue to look at it for an indefinite period of time, during which his faculties lost their usefulness; people whom he knew might pass along the sidewalk, nod graciously to him, and then, not realizing his condition, vow never to speak again to so wooden a young snob. And into such a revery—if revery it were that held no thoughts, no visions, but only the one glamorous portrait of an empty window—he fell to-day. The voices of the children, sharp with purpose, shrill with protest, but died in his tranced ear as if they came from far away. The whole summer day, the glancing amber of the sunshine, the white clouds ballooning overhead between the tree-tops, the warm touch and smell of the air—these fell away from his consciousness. “He’s nothing,” the lonely poetess brusquely wrote of him; and now, for the time, it was almost true, since he was little more than a thought of a vacant window.
When Renfrew was in this jellied state, something rather unusual was needed to rouse him—though a fire-department ladder-truck going by, with the gong palavering, had done it. What roused him to-day were sounds less metallic, but comparable in volume and in certain ways more sensational. As he stood, fixed upon the window, he slowly and vaguely became aware that the children seemed to be excited about something. Like some woodland dreamer who discovers that a crow commune overhead has been in hot commotion for some time without his noticing it, he was not perturbed, but gradually wakened enough to wonder what the matter was. Then he turned and looked mildly about him.
His sister Daisy still held her slipper, but it was now in her left hand; in her right she had a shingle. Accompanied by Robert Eliot, she was advancing in a taunting manner upon Laurence Coy; and all three, as well as the rest of the children, may be described as continuously active and poignantly vociferous. Master Coy had armed himself with a croquet mallet, and his face expressed nothing short of red desperation; he was making a last stand. He warned the world that he would not be responsible for what he did with this mallet.
Master Eliot also had a mallet; he and Daisy moved toward Laurence, feinting, charging and retreating, while the other children whooped, squealed, danced and gave shrill advice how the outlaw might best be taken.
Daisy was the noisiest of all. “I’ll show you, Mister Laurence Coy!” she cried. “You went an’ tore my collar, an’ you hit me with your elbow on my nose, an’——”
“I’m glad I did!” Laurence returned.
“It hurts me, too!” Daisy proclaimed.
“I’m glad it does! You had no business to grab me, an’ I’m glad I——”
“We’ll show you!” she promised him. “Soon as we get hold of you I’m goin’ to spank you till this shingle’s all wore out, an’ then I’m goin’ to keep on till my slipper’s all wore out, an’ then I’m goin’ to take off my other slipper an’——”
“Look, Daisy!” Elsie Threamer cried. “While Robert keeps in front of him, why don’t you go round behind him? Then you could grab his mallet, and Robert could throw him down.”