“‘No—o,’ says Purt. ‘Sh—sh—shave.’
“Jimmy grunted, dropped back the chair, muffled Purt up in the towels, and then squinted up and down his victim’s cheeks. Finally he mumbled something about being ‘right back’ and ran into Mr. Belding’s and came back with a watchmaker’s glass stuck in his eye. Then he squinted up and down Purt’s face some more and finally mixed a big mug of lather—and lathered Purt’s eyebrows!”
“Oh! what for?” demanded Dora Lockwood.
“That’s what Purt asked him,” giggled Bobby. “Jimmy said in his gruff way:
“‘I’m hanged if I can see hair anywhere else on your face, Pretty. You want your eyebrows shaved off, don’t ye, Pretty?’ So, Chet says, Purt’s been trying to shave himself since then in a piece of broken mirror out in the wood shed, and with a jack-knife.”
Although Nellie Agnew laughed, too, at Bobby’s story, she was in no jolly mood when she parted from the other girls and entered Dr. Agnew’s premises.
The doctor, Nellie’s father, was a broadly educated physician—one of the small class of present day medical men who, like the “family doctor” of a past generation, claimed no “specialty” and treated everything from mumps to a broken leg. He was a rather full-bodied man, with a pink, wrinkled face, cleanly shaven every morning of his life; black hair with silver threads in it and worn long; old-fashioned detachable cuffs to his shirts, and a black string tie that went around his collar twice, the ends of which usually fluttered in the breeze.
There had long since been established between the good doctor and his daughter a confidential relation very beautiful to behold. Mrs. Agnew was a very lovely woman, rather stylish in dress, and much given to church and club work. Perhaps that is why Dr. Agnew had made such a comrade of Nellie. She might, otherwise, have lacked any personal guide at a time in her life when she most needed it.
It was no new thing, therefore, that Nellie should follow the doctor into the office that evening after dinner, and perch on the broad arm of his desk chair while he lit the homely pipe that he indulged in once a day—usually before the rush of evening patients.
When Nellie had told her father all about the unpleasant quarrel at the gymnasium the doctor smoked thoughtfully for several minutes. Then he said, in his clear, quiet voice—the calm quality of which Nellie had herself inherited: