“Sure, Betty’s all right,” Tommy declared, and added: “I suppose you have seen me walking past with her several times, haven’t you?”
Meadowcroft had noticed the pair—or rather, the two; for Tommy was so thin and carried himself so badly that Betty was truly a baby giant beside him.
“It’s the only way I can get hold of her to talk about magic, she’s so awfully busy,” Tommy explained. “But anyhow, it’s funny, for she ain’t really any thinner or any shorter—the heels of her new shoes don’t let her down hardly enough to count—but I don’t mind walking with Betty now. I like to. I’ve made up my mind it wasn’t her size before, hardly at all; but it was her looking so grown-up with long dresses and her hair pugged like a lady’s. Walking beside her was like walking with a teacher. And, gee! how a fellow feels to walk with a female teacher after he gets out of the primary!”
“Betty certainly looks different and she doesn’t act like the same person,” remarked Meadowcroft. “I hoped she would come in to see me soon again, but she hurries by the house always. You might tell her I want to see her to learn whether we have got to get acquainted all over again.”
“You won’t have to do that. She’s the same old Betty,” declared the boy. “And yet in a way she ain’t. Anyhow, the funny part of it all is, she is so sort of—well, innocent-like. Honest and true, Mr. Meadowcroft, you’d think she had always had her hair flapping down her back with a bow tied to it and worn brown shoes with ribbon strings and looked like other girls, she acts so natural. But I know why.”
“Why Tommy, what is it? What do you mean?” demanded the other.
“Bee in her bonnet,” remarked the boy, and the man marveled at his insight and wondered that he hadn’t had the wit to solve the problem thus.
“What’s the nature of the insect, Mr. Magician?” he inquired.
“It’s all about Rose Harrow, the girl that went blind, you know,” Tommy returned with an important air. “Betty simply went wild over her and the wilder she is the more she forgets about herself and being big or little or—anything.”
Meadowcroft knit his brows.