“When’s your father coming home?”
“I don’t quite know—but I look for him any time now.”
Dicky started to set the table. “I guess I wouldn’t have cried,” he said after a while, “if I could have cried last night when I first heard it. But of course I couldn’t let mother or Doc O’Brien know that I’d heard them—it would make them feel bad. I don’t want my mother ever to know that I know it.”
After that, Maida redoubled her efforts to be nice to Dicky. She cudgeled her brains too for new decorative schemes for his paper-work. She asked Billy Potter to bring a whole bag of her books from the Beacon Street house and she lent them to Dicky, a half dozen at a time.
Indeed, they were a very busy quartette—the W.M.N.T.’s. Rosie went to school every day. She climbed out of her window no more at night. She seemed to prefer helping Maida in the shop to anything else. Arthur Duncan was equally industrious. With no Rosie to play hookey with, he, too, was driven to attending school regularly. His leisure hours were devoted to his whittling and wood-carving. He was always doing kind things for Maida and Granny, bringing up the coal, emptying the ashes, running errands.
And so November passed into December.