"Thank you, Wilbur, dear!" Mrs. Penniman was first to recover her poise.
"Thanks ever so much," echoed Winona, doubtfully.
She must first know that he had come by this money righteously. The judge adjusted spectacles to read the label on his gift.
"Thank you, my boy. The stuff may give me temporary relief."
He had felt affronted that any one could suppose one bottle of anything would make a new man of him; and—inconsistently enough—affronted that any one should suppose he needed to be made a new man of. He had not liked the phrase at all.
"And now perhaps you will tell us——" began Winona, her lips again tightening. But the Wilbur twin could not yet be brought down to mere history.
"This is an awful fighting dog," he was saying. "He's called Frank, and he eats them up. Yes, sir, he nearly et up that old Boodles dog just now. He would of if I hadn't stopped him. He minds awful well."
"Spent all our money!" declaimed Merle in a public-school voice, using "our" for the first time since his defeat of the morning. Certain of Winona's support, it had again become their money. "And cursing, swearing, fighting, smoking!"
"Oh, Wilbur!" exclaimed the shocked Winona; yet there was dismay more than rebuke in her tone, for she had brought the album to view. "If you've been a bad boy perhaps I should not accept this lovely gift from you. Remember—we don't yet know how you obtained all this money."
"Ho! I earned that money good! That old fat Mr. Whipple said I earned it good. He said he wouldn't of done what I done——"