“My dear Boy!” exclaimed Miss Letty, distressed. “Not worth working for! How did you get such ideas in your head? What is worth working for?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” said Boy. “Not much, I expect. All you can do is to amuse yourself, and you want lots of money for that!”
The pained expression deepened on Miss Letty’s sweet old face, but she could say nothing just then, as a diversion was created by the sudden bouncing entrance of Alister McDonald, accompanied by his mother, both damp with rain, but both with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, back from Edinburgh, and fresh from their drive through the storm from the Callander station.
“Please excuse us!” laughed Mrs. McDonald. “But we thought you might be having tea about this time, so we risked coming in!”
Miss Leslie welcomed them heartily, with the unaffected sincerity which was her great charm, and ordered fresh tea and scones; while Alister, drawing Boy aside, related to him with graphic picturesqueness of detail his thrilling experiences at the dentist’s.
“He said, would I have gas? I said, what is gas? And mother said it was a stuff you took through a tube, and you went off stiff and silly, and didn’t know what was going on! And I said no, I wouldn’t have gas. I liked to know what was being done to me anyhow! ‘It will hurt you, sir,’ said he. I said ‘All right; it hurts now.’ ‘Sit in this chair,’ he said, ‘and keep still.’ I sat in a big chair with a sort of iron swivel on to it, and I laid my head back, and opened my mouth wide. And he looked in. And I thought of the execution of Charles the First! Then he said, ‘Now, sir, steady!’ Then I shut my eyes and repeated in my head,
The boy stood on the burning deck,
When all but him had fled!
and before I got to ‘fled’ out came the tooth with a big prong at the end. And I never cried. And he said to me, ‘Did it hurt you?’ ‘Not a bit,’ said I. But of course it did. Only he wasn’t going to crow over me—not if I knew it! And he didn’t. He looked pretty small, I can tell you, with that tooth in his nippers. My! What scones! Such a jolly lot of butter!” And his conversation terminated abruptly in a huge bite of the succulent material offered to him by one of the ladies already on duty to attend his budding masculinity.
Boy watched him enjoying his tea with wonder and a touch of envy. He too would have bidden defiance to the terrors of the dentist as carelessly as Alister, but it would have been out of sheer indifference, not combativeness. Here was the contrast between the temperaments of the two boys, and a very serious contrast it was. The slight affair of Alister’s tooth was a test of character. Boy would have gone through the painful ordeal with quiet stoicism because he would not have considered it worth while to do otherwise,—Alister went through it with the idea that somehow or other he was more than a match for the dentist. Herein was the varying quality of environment which would make of the one boy a warm-blooded, courageous man, and of the other perhaps a languid cynic. Young as the children were, any close student of human nature could trace the diverging possibilities of each mind already, and the uncomfortable little pang at Miss Letty’s heart was not hurting her without some cause. However, she was not of a morose or morbid disposition, and she would not allow herself to give way to these first premonitions of doubt as to Boy’s development. She resolved to make one more effort to rescue him from his uncouth home surroundings, and meanwhile she contented herself with letting him enjoy his holiday as much as possible, and giving him all the liberty he seemed to need.
One day, however, there occurred a grand catastrophe. Major Desmond had left his gun in the hall, with express orders that it was not to be touched. But just about an hour before dinner there was the sound of a tremendous explosion, and a crash of glass,—and on a contingent of the household running to see what was the matter, lo! there was the Major’s gun in the same place and position, but a charge was missing, and one of the windows in the hall was shivered to atoms. The Major had a temper, and he lost it for the immediate moment.