“Yes’m, I did,” answered Tom apologetically.
“Of all things on a day like this!” Mrs. Morris shook her head hopelessly. “Well, boys have no sense, anyway. Now take that coat right off and—— And no overshoes, either! Tom Pollock, you ought to be spanked and put to bed!”
“Yes’m,” agreed Tom sheepishly.
Five minutes later, divested of his wet clothes and chastely attired in a voluminous bath-robe of Mr. Morris’s, he was toasting in front of a big fire in the library and drinking beef tea that Mrs. Morris made by dropping a mysterious dark-brown tablet into a cup of hot water. It was very nice, and its effect, or perhaps the combined effects of the hard tussle with the blizzard and the warmth of the fire, was to make Tom feel delightfully drowsy and comfortable. When, presently, he had finished the beef tea and Mrs. Morris had returned from bearing away the empty cup, an unwonted boldness came to him.
“I wish,” he said as Mrs. Morris sank into a chair at the other side of the hearth, “I wish you’d tell me, please, what’s the matter with my hair.”
She looked at it concernedly. Tom, however, saw the laughter in her eyes. “Is it bothering you again, Tom?” she asked. “I’m so sorry!”
“It—it don’t bother me at all,” he responded desperately. “Only you’re all the time telling me not to let it! Is it just because it’s red?”
Then Mrs. Morris laughed deliciously. “No, Tom, it isn’t,” she said. “I suppose I’ve been horribly mean to tease you about it, haven’t I?”
“I didn’t mind,” Tom assured her earnestly. “Only—I wondered what it was. I asked Sid and he said he guessed it was just one of your jokes.”
“Of course it was; a rather silly one, too, Tom. Do you remember stopping one day in front of Sewall’s jewelry store and looking in a mirror?”