“I was ’shame’ of myse’f, that’s w’y. If you wouldn’ gave me no suppa, an’ no bed, an’ no fire, I don’ say.’ I wouldn’ been ’shame’ then.”
“Well, sir,” interrupted the red-faced man, “you’ve got a pretty square case against him, I see. Not only for malicious trespass, but of theft. See this bolt?” producing a piece of iron from his coat pocket. “That’s what gave him away.”
“I en’t no thief!” blurted Mamouche, indignantly. “It’s one piece o’ iron w’at I pick up in the road.”
“Sir,” said Doctor John-Luis with dignity, “I can understand how the grandson of Théodule Peloté might be guilty of such mischievous pranks as this boy has confessed to. But I know that the grandson of Stéphanie Galopin could not be a thief.”
And he at once wrote out the check for twenty-five dollars, and handed it to the red-faced man with the tips of his fingers.
It seemed very good to Doctor John-Luis to have the boy sitting again at his fireside; and so natural, too. He seemed to be the incarnation of unspoken hopes; the realization of vague and fitful memories of the past.
When Mamouche kept on crying, Doctor John-Luis wiped away the tears with his own brown silk handkerchief.
“Mamouche,” he said, “I want you to stay here; to live here with me always. To learn how to work; to learn how to study; to grow up to be an honorable man. An honorable man, Mamouche, for I want you for my own child.”
His voice was pretty low and husky when he said that.
“I shall not take the key from the door to-*night,” he continued. “If you do not choose to stay and be all this that I say, you may open the door and walk out. I shall use no force to keep you.”