"I'm afraid I can't endorse either your taste or your judgment there, Miss Dorothy. You've come for a poor stick. I can't imagine myself as being much benefit to any sort of project. However, I shall be glad to hear about it, of course. What is it?"
And Miss Dorothy told him. With her eyes shining, and her voice quivering with eagerness, she told the story as she had told it to Susan the afternoon before, but with even greater elaboration of detail.
"And so now, Mr. Burton, you—you will help, won't you?" she begged, in closing.
"Help! But my dear girl, how?"
"Take charge. Be the head and shoulders, the backbone of the whole thing. Oh, yes, I know it's a whole lot to ask," she hurried on, as she saw the dawning dismay and refusal in his face. "But I thought, for the sake of the cause—"
"The cause!" The man's voice was bitter as he interrupted her. "I'd crawl to France on my hands and knees if that would do any good! But, my dear young lady, I'm an ignoramus, and worse than an ignoramus, when it comes to machinery. I'll venture to wager that I wouldn't know the tape from the coils—or whatever they are."
"Oh, we'd have an engineer for that part, of course," interposed the girl eagerly. "And we want your son, too."
"You want Keith! Pray, do you expect him to teach how to wind coils?"
"No—no—not exactly;—though I think he will be teaching before he realizes it. I want him to learn to wind them himself, and thus get others to learn. You don't understand, Mr. Burton. I want you and Mr. Keith to—to do just what you did for John McGuire—arouse interest and enthusiasm and get them to do it. Don't you see?"
"But that was Keith, not I, in the case of John McGuire."