"Doctor—doctor—" was all I could say, for words failed me, and I, also, stood looking thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, with eyes that saw two small brown feathered bodies in the place where, a minute before, there had been but one.
"Come when you're ready, come when you're ready," he repeated, "and we'll make you welcome, Tina and I."
I grasped his hand without speaking, and as I wrung it in my own, I felt that it was long and fine and nervous,—the hand, not of a worker, but of a dreamer. Then tearing my gaze from the sparrow, I went back through the clump of red currant bushes, and between the shining rows of oyster shells, to the busy street which led to a busy world and my office door.
A fortnight later the house was sold over our heads, and when I came up in the afternoon, I found a red flag flying at the gate, and the dusty buggies of a few real estate men tied to the young maples on the sidewalk. Upstairs Sally was sitting on a couch, in the midst of the scattered furniture, while George Bolingbroke stood looking ruefully at a pile of silver and bric-a-brac that filled the centre of the floor.
"Are you laughing now, Sally?" I asked desperately, as I entered.
"Not just this minute, dear, because that awful man and a crowd of people have been going over the house, and Aunt Euphronasia and I locked ourselves in the nursery. I'll begin again, however, as soon as they've gone. All these things belong to George. It was silly of him to buy them, but he says he had no idea of allowing them to go to strangers."
"Well, George as well as anybody, I suppose," I responded, moodily.
Beside the window Aunt Euphronasia was rocking slowly back and forth, with little Benjamin fast asleep on her knees, and her great rolling eyes, rimmed with white, passed from me to George and from George to me with a defiant and angry look.
"I ain' seen nuttin' like dese yer doin's sence war time," she grumbled; "en hit's wuss den war time, caze war time hit's fur all, en dish yer hit ain't fur nobody cep'n us."
Throwing herself back on the pillow, Sally lay for a minute with her hand over her eyes.