"Oh, yes; it doesn't matter. I'll be glad to give her a trial, anyway; and if she's all you crack her up to be I'll pay her more than what's right. When can she come? Where does she live?"
"Well, she's going to live here in Dalton," evaded the doctor cautiously. "She's not here yet; but she and her mother are coming—er—next week, I believe. Better not count on her beginning work till the first, though, perhaps. That'll be next week Thursday. I should think they ought to be—er—settled by that time." The doctor drew a long breath, much after the fashion of a man who has been crossing a bit of particularly thin ice.
"All right. Send her along. The sooner the better," nodded Burke, the old listless weariness coming back to his eyes. "I certainly need—some one."
"Oh, well, I reckon you'll have—some one, now," caroled the doctor, so jubilantly that it brought a frown of mild wonder to Burke Denby's face.
Later, the doctor, still jubilant and confident, hurried down the Denby walk intent on finding the "modest little apartment" for Helen.
"Oh, well, I don't know!" he exulted to himself, wagging his head like a cocksure boy. "This comic-opera-farce affair may not be so bad, after all. Anyhow, I've made my first exit—and haven't spilled anything yet. Now for scene second!"
Finding a satisfactory little furnished apartment, not too far from the Denby home, proved to be no small task. But by sacrificing a little on the matter of distance, the doctor was finally enabled to engage one that he thought would answer.
"Only she'll have to ride back and forth, I'm afraid," he muttered to himself, as he started for the station to take his train. "Anyhow, I'm glad I didn't take that one on Dale Street. She'd meet too many ghosts of old memories on Dale Street."
Buying his paper at the newsstand in the station, the doctor himself encountered the ghost of a memory. But he could not place it until the woman behind the counter cried:—
"There! I thought I'd seen you before. You come two years ago to the Denby fun'ral, now, didn't ye? I tell ye it takes me ter remember faces." Then, as he still frowned perplexedly, she explained: "Don't ye remember? My name's Cobb. I used ter live—" But the doctor had turned away impatiently. He remembered now. This was the woman who didn't "think much of old Denby" herself.