“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. Two whole weeks without magic is no cinch, believe me! I think I’d rather go to school even with the extra class after school thrown in,” he declared.
He grinned and Meadowcroft smiled.
“I wish myself I could be here to help you while away some of the time, Tommy,” he assured the boy warmly. “But I must return to Philadelphia to finish something I had just started in January when I was summoned back to take the school. If it were not really important, I would wait a fortnight and play with you. I have been thinking that perhaps we might rig up a sort of laboratory in the billiard-room and do a bit of experimentation in chemistry and physics in lieu of magic?”
“Gee! that would be bully!” Tommy cried with shining eyes.
“And more useful and perhaps just as much fun?” Meadowcroft suggested.
Whereupon Tommy Finnemore approved himself a true artist.
“’Twould be heaps of fun and I’d like to do it first-rate, but if it was a free choice, you know, magic for mine always,” he confessed. “I shouldn’t wonder if part of the reason I like it so much is that it ain’t any real good—all goes up in smoke. Dad thinks I’m lazy and shiftless and good-for-nothing, and like as not I am. He says I don’t take after him, and if he only knew it, I’m mighty thankful I don’t. But I’ll get along till you come back—one thing and another. There are other things. Like as not, I’ll get off in the woods by myself and play on a comb—that ain’t so bad.”
“You’d better devote yourself to Betty as much as you can,” Meadowcroft counseled. “Something’s wrong with her—terribly wrong, it would appear—and I rather think you know what it is. Fortunately, she hasn’t turned against you, and you may be able to do something to cheer her up.”
“If I could only do magic!” cried the boy. “A trick I was just going to work on would fairly take your breath away if I could get it to come out. And that’s what Betty needs—to have her breath taken away so that she—forgets, you know.”
Bouncing from his chair, he went to the fire and poked it vigorously sending the smoke out into the room.