Bab, you understand, never left Mrs. Tilney's. The night of the mother's funeral Mr. Mapleson slipped down the hall toward Mrs. Tilney's parlor. She sat there shrouded in the dusk and crooning softly.
"Well?" asked Mr. Mapleson.
"Hush!" whispered Mrs. Tilney fiercely. Pressed tight to her flat, unlovely breast was Bab's rumpled head, and Mr. Mapleson had said no more.
For those first few years the little old man sold dictionaries for a living. It was a sordid, distressing trade. Then, too, the snubs he received were, to a man of his shy nature, each a crucifixion. Eventually, though, he was enabled to get other employment. It was as bookkeeper in the Pine Street real-estate office.
That day his joy rose to a pitch of bubbling exultation. Picking up Bab, he tossed her high.
"Diamonds and pearls! Diamonds and pearls! You'll wear 'em yet, you wait!"
But Bab Wynne was of a far more practical turn of mind.
"Did you bring me my licorice stick?" she demanded.
It was Mr. Mapleson who had first taught Bab her letters. Step by step he brought her up until it was time to send Bab to a school. Then, the school having been selected, with the child's hand in his Mr. Mapleson walked there with her every morning. At night, too, it was Mr. Mapleson who always heard her lessons. "Spell cat," Mr. Mapleson would say; and when Bab, after deep thought, announced that c-a-t spelled cat, Mr. Mapleson would exclaim: "Very good! Very good!" and, laying down the spelling book, would pick up the reader. "Read, please," he would direct; and the little girl, bending earnestly over her book, would display to the man's breathless interest that wonderful evidence of the Creation, the marvel of a child's growing mind. "Oh, see the ox! Is the ox kind? Yes, the ox is kind."