“You don’t care about sending him before to-morrow,” he said.
“Why, no,” said the doctor, smiling in return. “I don’t know that to-morrow would not do on the whole.”
“Well, send him to-morrow, then, or any day after, when you and he are ready, and Aleck here shall teach him what he knows for a while, and then I’ll take him in hand and see if we can’t make something pretty nearly as good as a doctor out of him.”
“All right, and thank you,” said the doctor laughing; “I don’t doubt you’ll get him in advance of some of us, and before so very many years either.”
So far so good; now for settling the matter with Thorndyke, and he lost no more time about that than in what had come before.
“See here, little man,” he said, darting one of the old glances in Thorndyke’s face, as he came in and found him waiting as usual in the office, and as usual buried in a book, “do you remember my telling you once on a time, and possibly more than once, that there was a place in the world for you as well as for the rest of us?”
Thorndyke had started, as he always did, at the first sound of the doctor’s voice, and met it with the same smile that had troubled him a year ago, but which he had seen so many times since as to expect nothing else. But as the sentence was finished he shrank back again. What could the doctor be going to say? If it were only about a share in the fight, why that was all right, but anything more! The doctor could not be mistaken in anything else, but it was of no use talking about that. He could be a soldier, and he was trying hard for it; but one of the princes!
“Do you remember, little man?” said the doctor again.
“Yes, I remember.”