“Like it?” The dark eyes in the pale, wan face were like stars. “O, Miss Dolittle, what it will mean to me!”
Miss Harriet Dingley did nod when she heard Bobs singing out “Good-bye,” but Miss Peerwinkle seemed to be as deaf as a statue.
“I could laugh,” Bobs said to herself as she joined the throng on Fifth Avenue, “if my heart wasn’t so full of tears. I don’t know as I can stand much more of seeing how the other half lives without having a good cry over it. Dickens, the only friend and comforter of that frail little mite of humanity!”
Then, as she turned again toward Avenue A, she suddenly remembered the package of detective stories for which she had promised to call at the shop where there was a spray of lilacs and a much-loved invalid woman.
“I guess I’ll give up the detective game,” she thought, as she hurried along, “but I’ll enjoy reading the stories just the same.”
Half an hour later she had changed her mind and had decided that she really was a very fine detective indeed.
CHAPTER X.
BOBS AS BOOKSELLER
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Bobs entered the musty book shop on the East Side and found the place unoccupied. However, the tinkling of a bell sounded in the back room and the little old man shuffled in. His expression was troubled, and when Roberta inquired for his invalid wife, he replied that she wasn’t so well. “Poor Marlitta,” he said, and there was infinite tenderness in his voice, “she’s yearning to go back to the home country where our children are and their children, and the doctor thinks it might make her strong once again to be there, but the voyage costs money, and Marlitta would rather die here than not go honest.”
The old man seemed to be overcome with emotion, then suddenly recalling his customer’s errand, he shuffled away to procure the package of detective stories for which she had called. During his absence Roberta went back of the counter, reached for a book on an upper shelf and, while so doing, dislodged several others that tumbled about her, revealing, as though it had been hidden in the dark recess back of them, the rare book which that morning had been taken from the Queerwitz Antique Shop.
That, then, was what the old man meant when he said that his Marlitta would not go unless she could “go honest.”