"Hi," exclaimed Roger joyfully as Jo disappeared; "isn't he a good chap! Now then, Mater, if your oldest son were a little younger or your younger son were a little older one of them might be a caddy on the golf links and earn his ice-cream cones that way," and he danced a few joyous steps for his mother's admiration.
"If you undertake a thing like this you'll have to stick to it," Mrs. Morton warned again, for Roger's chief fault was that he tired quickly of one thing after another.
"A postage stamp'll be nothing to me, and you're a duck to let me do it. Here, kids," he cried as the two Ethels came out of the house, "gaze on me! I'm a horny-handed son of toil. I belong to the laboring classes. I earn my living—or rather my rooming—by the perspiration of my eyebrow," and he explained the situation to the admiring girls and to Helen, who joined them.
"I wish there was something I could do," sighed Helen enviously. "I suppose I could wait on table somewhere."
"I'm afraid it will have to be in this cottage right here," responded her mother. "Even when Mary comes to-morrow we shall be short handed so everybody will have to help."
Mary had been Roger's nurse and had stayed on in the family until now, when Dicky was too old to need a nurse, she had become a working housekeeper. She had remained behind to put the Rosemont house in order after the family left, and she was expected to arrive the next day by the same train that had brought the family.
"I will, Mother," said Helen. "It's only that doing something to earn your living seems to be in the air here, and I must have caught a germ on the way down from the trolley gate."
"You'll be doing something to earn your living by helping at home, and all you would get by waiting on table at a boarding cottage would be your meals and not money."
"Still, it would relieve Father's pocketbook if there were one mouth less to feed."
"True, dear, but Father is quite willing to pay that much for his daughter's service to her family, if you want to look at it in that light."