“Melville, take care!” warned Octave.
Ruth’s ear had caught the word. As she knew but one professor with whom Melville had any acquaintance, and as he was thousands of miles away when last she had heard of him, her interest was freshly aroused.
“The professor? Has thee heard from him?”
“Yes, I have had three letters from him,” proudly replied the invalid, quite thrown off his guard. “I have put them away in the most careful place, now; but it was one of those that I thought Paula had destroyed, as well as my ‘calculations.’ Think of my having, really having them written to me, too, three letters from a man so famous!”
“Humph! I did not know that the professor was so great. He seemed to me a dreamer and a rather insignificant person altogether. What is he doing now?” asked Miss Kinsolving, with her mind quite upon the wrong person.
“Why, Aunt Ruth! You cannot read the papers much! What is he not doing for science and the world? Think of all the wonderful helps to suffering people he has thought of in that one brain of his! Oh, it’s grand, grand! And to think that Mel—”
“Octave, take care!” warned the boy in his turn, but with eyes shining from the enthusiasm her words had aroused.
Ruth looked from one to the other, and with an expression so dismayed that Octave could not refrain from laughing.
“Excuse me, Aunt Ruthy; but you do look so bothered, and it is all so splendid, if you only knew! Won’t you just step out into the other room, and let me talk the thing over with Melville for a minute? Then I can know just how much to tell, and what I should not.”
This was certainly a novel proposition from a girl to her guardian; but Octave’s earnestness disarmed it of offence. All that Ruth did ejaculate was a characteristic “Humph!” but the tone in which it was uttered said volumes.