"Have a heart!"
"Sixty."
"It isn't as though ..."
"Sixty."
Dolly threw up her hands despairingly.
"Oh, give it him," she said. "He won't be happy if you don't. If a guy's middle name is Shylock, where's the use wasting time trying to do anything about it?"
III
Mrs. Molloy's prediction that on the night of Rudge's annual dramatic and musical entertainment the Hall would be completely emptied of its occupants was not, as it happened, literally fulfilled. A wanderer through the stable yard at about the hour of ten would have perceived a light in an upper window: and had he taken the trouble to get a ladder and climb up and look in would have beheld John Carroll seated at his table, busy with a pile of accounts.
In an age so notoriously avid of pleasure as the one in which we live it is rare to find a young man of such sterling character that he voluntarily absents himself from a village concert in order to sit at home and work: and, contemplating John, one feels quite a glow. It was not as if he had been unaware of what he was missing. The vicar, he knew, was to open the proceedings with a short address: the choir would sing old English glees: the Misses Vivien and Alice Pond-Pond were down on the programme for refined coon songs: and, in addition to other items too numerous and fascinating to mention, Hugo Carmody and his friend Mr. Fish would positively appear in person and render that noble example of Shakespeare's genius, the Quarrel Scene from Julius Cæsar. Yet John Carroll sat in his room, working. England's future cannot be so dubious as the pessimists would have us believe while her younger generation is made of stuff like this.