He was an answer to ardent and secret prayer, this Man Who Lets You Play with the Puppy, and Bobby looked up to him with a great deal of awe; his words carried the weight of authority. He seemed to understand what small boys want, to know that the greatest of all treasures, a real live puppy, is good for them.
Thus the happy days in the country passed like magic.
[CHAPTER II]
THE BOY WITH EIGHT BIRTHDAYS
One afternoon the puppy was not to be found anywhere. Bobby returned to the front yard at Mr. Eller's, after a vain search for his playmate, and found that that day was a very special occasion.
The grown-ups, and the children, too, were celebrating something which seemed to be called a "birthdays." It belonged to Richard, the small son of the Man Who Lets You Play with the Puppy. It was the boy's eighth birthdays, and he was very proud of that fact.
There was ice-cream—enough so that Bobby's dish was heaped full a second time without asking and before he had quite finished the first helping—and cake and two big red and white apples for each child. Bobby was still munching contentedly away at his first apple, the other clutched tightly in his left hand, when Richard's mothers led the children into the house to see the "presents."