“I’ll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Lydia.
“They won’t—nor anything else,” her aunt assured her.
Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man’s next statement.
“I’ve got an apprentice,” he announced.
“Eh?” queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.
“The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy’s been bad—truant—street gamin—all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for tools—maybe his ancestors were mediæval craftsmen. Anyhow, he’s been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he’s been so interested he’s forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn’t he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it.”
“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” cried Lydia.
The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. “Of course you know the end of that.”
“You mean he’ll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?”