'Grandma sends you her compliments, and is very sorry that she has rheumatism this morning and cannot come to-night to help you. She thinks, perhaps, you can get Mrs. Mosher.'
'Your grandmother can't come, when I depended so much upon her, and she thinks I can get Mrs. Mosher, that termagant, who would raise a mutiny in the kitchen in an hour!' Mrs. Tracy said this so sharply that a flush mounted to the handsome face of the boy, who felt as if he were in some way a culprit and being reprimanded. 'She must come, if she does nothing but sit in the kitchen and keep order,' was Mrs. Tracy's next remark.
'She can't,' Harold replied; 'her foot and ankle is all swelled and aches so she almost cries. She is awful sorry, and so am I, for I was coming with her to see the show.'
This speech put a new idea into Mrs. Tracy's mind, and she said to the boy:
'How would you like to come anyway, and stay in the upper hall, and tell the people where to go? The boy I engaged has disappointed me. You are rather small for the place, but I guess you'll do, and I will give you fifty cents.'
'I'd like it first-rate,' Harold said, his face brightening at the thought of earning fifty cents and seeing the show at the same time.
Half-dollars were not very plentiful with Harold, and he was trying to save enough to buy his grandmother a pair of spectacles, for he had heard her say that she could not thread her needle as readily as she once did, and must have glasses as soon as she had the money to spare. Harold had seen a pair at the drug-store for one dollar, and, without knowing at all whether they would fit his grandmother's eyes or not, had asked the druggist to keep them until he had the required amount. Fifty cents would just make it, and he promised at once that he would come; but in an instant there fell a shadow upon his face as he thought of Tom, his tormentor, who worried him so much.
'What is it?' Mrs. Tracy asked, as she detected in him a disposition to reconsider.
'Will Tom be up in the hall?' Harold asked.
'Of course not,' Mrs. Tracy replied. 'He will be in the parlors until ten o'clock, and then he will go to bed. Why do you ask?'