“Mostly not,” said her uncle, chuckling. “It's really an improvement on the Scotch terrier. There's later patents in him, you might say. He's a sort of mosaic; indeed, when I think of it you might describe him as a pure mosaic dog.”
“A Mosaic dog!” exclaimed Lennox. “Then he must have come from scriptural parts. Perhaps I'll get playing with him Sundays. Not playing loud out, you know, but just being happy. I love being happy, don't you?”
“It's my only weakness,” said Mr. Dyce, emphatically, blinking through his glasses. “The other business men in the town don't approve of me for it; they call it frivolity. But it comes so easily to me I never charge it in the bills, though a sense of humor should certainly be worth 12s. 6d. a smile in the Table of Fees. It would save many a costly plea.”
“Didn't you play on Sunday in Chicago?” asked Ailie.
“Not out loud. Poppa said he was bound to have me Scotch in one thing at least, even if it took a strap. That was after mother died. He'd just read to me Sundays, and we went to church till we had pins and needles. We had the Reverend Ebenezer Paul Frazer, M.A., Presbyterian Church on the Front. He just preached and preached till we had pins and needles all over.”
“My poor Lennox!” exclaimed Ailie, with feeling.
“Oh, I'm all right!” said young America, blithely. “I'm not kicking.”
Dan Dyce, with his head to the side, took off his spectacles and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief; put them on again, looked at his niece through them, and then at Ailie, with some motion struggling in his countenance. Ailie for a moment suppressed some inward convulsion, and turned her gaze embarrassed from him to Bell, and Bell catching the eyes of both of them could contain her joy no longer. They laughed till the tears came, and none more heartily than brother William's child. She had so sweet a laugh that there and then the Dyces thought it the loveliest sound they had ever heard in their house. Her aunts would have devoured her with caresses. Her uncle stood over her and beamed, rubbing his hands, expectant every moment of another manifestation of the oddest kind of child mind he had ever encountered. And Kate swept out and in between the parlor and the kitchen on trivial excuses, generally with something to eat for the child, who had eaten so much in the house of Wanton Wully Oliver that she was indifferent to the rarest delicacies of Bell's celestial grocery.
“You're just—just a wee witch!” said Bell, fondling the child's hair. “Do you know, that man Molyneux—”
“Jim,” suggested Lennox.