“Magic nothing!” Tommy grumbled, pausing in his wandering about the big handsome parlor and dropping like a jack-in-the-box into a deep, cushioned chair. “I was kep’ in after school for an hour every night for a week, and instead of making up to me for missing all that magic and all my visits here with you, what do you think dad did? He kep’ me at home all day Saturday and made me clean the woodshed, and no magic all this week. It’s what you call adding insult to injury. And all for—I was going to say nothing, but I guess you were right, Mr. Meadowcroft. It was really for science, as you call magic.”
“How was that?”
“The girl that sits in front of me—or did, because I don’t sit there since—has got long yellow hair with sort of a tossel on the end. She’s always a-switching it over my desk, and I’m always wishing the tossel would fall into my ink-well and wanting to give it a little poke but never doing it. But in one of my tricks I pour a few drops of liquid into a red solution and it takes the color all out and I says to myself I’ll try it with ink. I took a bottle of the solution to school and dipped Helen’s hair—the tip end, you know—into the ink-well and was just going to neutralize it by putting it into the bottle when the teacher caught me. I tried to explain and to get her to let me try the antidote, but—nothing doing!”
“Did Helen’s hair come out all right?” Meadowcroft inquired.
“It washed out, I guess,” Tommy returned indifferently. “Anyhow, ’twas only an inch or two and Betty says her Aunt Sarah trims her hair every new moon and the queer part of it was there was a new moon just that time. And what do you think? Betty offered to let me try it on her hair!”
Meadowcroft started.
“I didn’t do it,” Tommy reassured him. “I think it would have been safe enough, but if anything had happened and Betty had had to trim the end of her braid, her Aunt Sarah would have been sure to have missed it and made a fuss. And she hasn’t even got back to ordinary yet with Betty since she made all the changes, you know. And even her ordinary ain’t none too good.”
He rose, picked up his cap, and seating himself in another chair twirled it about his knee.
“She ain’t a mite more aggravating than dad, Aunt Sarah ain’t. There’s no one that can beat him at spoiling a home run every time. But she talks a lot more. She goes over and over and over the same things, and dad doesn’t waste any words.”
“That was a friendly offer on Betty’s part,” Meadowcroft observed rather musingly. For that seemed a part of this new independence of the girl that so puzzled him. It wasn’t, of course, possible that one could be quite made over, transformed, overnight. And yet, that seemed to have happened. He wondered if he should get the key to the puzzle when he saw Betty. But he didn’t, as a matter of fact, have to wait.