"Aw, shut-tup!" chorused his indignant little schoolmates. "Can't you see that Teacher's tellin' a story? Go chase yerself! Go do a tango roun' de block!"
Isaac, a small Polish Jew with tragic, dark eyes and one suspender, received these and several more such suggestions with all the calm impenetrability of his race.
"Here's de guy," was all he vouchsafed before he went back to the unsocial nook where, afternoon by faithful afternoon, he read away at a fat three-volume life of Alexander Hamilton.
The Liberry Teacher looked up without stopping her story, and smiled a familiar greeting to the elderly gentleman, who was waiting a little uncertainly at the Children's Room door, and had obviously been looking for her in vain. He smiled and nodded in return.
"Just a minute, please, Mr. De Guenther," said the Liberry Teacher cheerfully.
The elderly gentleman nodded again, crossed to Isaac and his ponderous volumes, and began to talk to him with that benign lack of haste which usually means a very competent personality. Phyllis hurried somewhat with Robin Hood among his little fishes, and felt happier. It was always, in her eventless life, something of a pleasant adventure to have Mr. De Guenther or his wife drop in to see her. There was usually something pleasant at the end of it.
They were an elderly couple whom she had known for some years. They were so leisurely and trim and gentle-spoken that long ago, when she was only a timorous substitute behind the circle of the big charging-desk, she had picked them both out as people-you'd-like-if-you-got-the-chance. Then she had waited on them, and identified them by their cards as belonging to the same family. Then, one day, with a pleased little quiver of joy, she had found him in the city Who's Who, age, profession (he was a corporation lawyer), middle names, favorite recreation, and all. Gradually she had come to know them both very well in a waiting-on way. She often chose love-stories that ended happily and had colored illustrations for Mrs. De Guenther when she was at home having rheumatism; she had saved more detective stories for Mr. De Guenther than her superiors ever knew; and once she had found his black-rimmed eye-glasses where he had left them between the pages of the Pri-Zuz volume of the encyclopedia, and mailed them to him.
When she had vanished temporarily from sight into the nunnery-promotion of the cataloguing room the De Guenthers had still remembered her. Twice she had been asked to Sunday dinner at their house, and had joyously gone and remembered it as joyously for months afterward. Now that she was out in the light of partial day again, in the Children's Room, she ran across both of them every little while in her errands upstairs; and once Mrs. De Guenther, gentle, lorgnetted and gray-clad, had been shown over the Children's Room. The couple lived all alone in a great, handsome old house that was being crowded now by the business district. She had always thought that if she were a Theosophist she would try to plan to have them for an uncle and aunt in her next incarnation. They suited her exactly for the parts.
But it's a long way down to the basement where city libraries are apt to keep their children, and the De Guenthers hadn't been down there since the last time they asked her to dinner. And here, with every sign of having come to say something very special, stood Mr. De Guenther! Phyllis' irrepressibly cheerful disposition gave a little jump toward the light. But she went on with her story—business before pleasure!
However, she did manage to get Robin Hood out of his brook a little more quickly than she had planned. She scattered her children with a swift executive whisk, and made so straight for her friend that she deceived the children into thinking they were going to see him expelled, and they banked up and watched with anticipatory grins.