“What position does your protégé want?” Van Dusen asked, drawing a scratch pad toward him, and poising a pencil.
“Compositor—isn't that it—when a man sets type? It's Lanny Welsh; I want him to have a better job than he has—in Derlingport.” She saw Van Dusen frown. “I think I'll tell you all about it,” she said; “I know I can trust you.”
“With your innermost secrets, on my honor as a bearded old editor,” smiled Van Dusen.
“Then it is this,” said Lucille and she told about Lanny and Alice.
Van Dusen demurred a little. He said Lanny was good enough for any girl, dominie's daughter or king's daughter, no matter whose daughter.
“And have you seen the Declarator?” Lucille demanded. “Is the editor of the Declarator good enough to be a dominie's daughter's father-in-law?”
Van Dusen admitted that this was another matter, and good-naturedly let Lucille have her way. When she had departed, he wrote to Bender of the Gazette. A few days later Lanny came to the manse, half elated and half displeased.
“Old Van is all right!” he told David. “I can't blame him for bouncing me when there's no work for me to do, and there's not one man in a thousand that would take the trouble to look up another job for me, and hand it to me with my blue envelope. I'm going up to work on the Gazette, at Derlingport, Mr. Dean. It just rips me all up to go that far from Alice, even for a little while, but I've got to do it. If we're going to be married in a year I need every day's work I can put in, and when you think that the Gazette job will pay more than my Eagle job, I guess you'll admit I've simply got to grab it.”
“When are you going?” asked David. “To-morrow,” said Lanny. “These jobs don't wait; you've got to take them while they're empty. Between you and me, Mr. Dean, I think I wouldn't have had a chance in the world if it hadn't been for Mr. Van Dusen. He's that sort, though.”
To David, knowing nothing of Lucille's having a hand in this, it seemed almost providential, this removal of Lanny to another town.