Rickety Dick came to take dinner at the tavern!
He was in his best rig, with which he was accustomed to outfit himself for the funerals of his old friends. There was a faded tail coat which flapped against baggy gray trousers. A celluloid collar on a flannel shirt propped up his wrinkled chin.
Martin Brophy stared at old Dick and then cast a look up at the office clock, whose hands, like Dick’s in the moment of mental stress, were upraised on the stroke of twelve.
“Flagg dead?” inquired Brophy, unable otherwise to account for Dick’s absence from the big house at the dinner hour.
“No! Toothache! Can’t eat to-day. He let me off to go to a burying.”
“Whose?”
Old Dick shook his head and passed on into the dining room, peering hard into the face of the waitress as he plodded toward her. “Burying!” he muttered. “May as well make sure it’s dead—and put it away.”
Lida met him as she was meeting her other problems up there—boldly.
She leaned over him when he was seated and recited the daily bill of fare. He did not take his eyes off her face, now close to his.
“Lida Kennard,” he whispered, hoarsely, panting, pulling the hard collar away from his throat with trembling fingers, “why ain’t ye home with your poor old grandfather, where ye belong? Lida Kennard, why ain’t ye home?”