"Why, Bud!" they said, and then there were shouts of laughter again, and Ruth could hardly command her voice to explain: "He came to me last night—tramped all the way up to our house in the snow, after meeting—because he said he wasn't so ''fraid' of me as he was of 'all them others.' Was that a compliment, girls, or an insult? Yes, Miss Benedict, he wants to help; offers to 'tend the fires,' and I shouldn't wonder if he could do it much better than it has been done at least. It was real funny, and real pitiful, too. He said it was the only 'livin' thing he knew how to do,' and that he was sure and certain he could do, and if it would help any, he would be awful glad to join."
"But doesn't he want to be paid?" screamed one of the girls.
"Paid? not he! I tell you he wants to join us. He said he wanted to do it to please her. That means you, Miss Benedict. You have won his heart in some way. Oh, it is the fruit of the sprained ankle. You know, girls, she said it was surely for some good purpose." Then they all went off into ecstatic laughter again. They were just at the age when it takes so little to convulse girls.
"But I am not yet enlightened," explained Claire, as soon as there was hope of her being heard. "Who is Bud?"
"Oh, is it possible you don't remember him? That is too cruel, when he is just devoted to you! Why, he is the furnace-boy at the Ansteds. I don't know where he saw you. He muttered something about the furnace and the register that I did not understand; but he plainly intimated that he was ready to be your devoted servant, and die for you, if need be, or at least, make the church fires as many days and nights as you should want them. Now the question is, what shall we do to the poor fellow?"
The furnace-boy at the Ansteds! Oh, yes, Claire remembered him, a great, blundering, apparently half-witted, friendless, hopeless boy. Claire's heart had gone out in pity for him the first time she ever saw him. He had been sent to her room to make some adjustment of the register-screw, and she had asked him if he understood furnaces, and if he liked to work, and if the snow was deep, and a few other aimless questions, just for the sake of speaking to him with a pleasant voice, and seeming to take an interest in his existence. Her father's heart had always overflowed with tenderness and helpfulness for all such boys. Claire had pleased herself—or perhaps I might say saddened herself—with thinking what her father, if he were alive, and should come in contact with Bud, would probably try to do for him. She could think of ways in which her father would work to help him, but she sadly told herself that all that was passed; her father was gone where he could not help Bud, and there were few men like him; and the boy would probably have to stumble along through a cold and lonely world. She had not thought of one thing that she could do for him; indeed, it had not so much as occurred to her as possible that there could be anything. After that first day she had not seen him again, until he came to the music-room with a message for Ella, and she had turned her head and smiled, and said "Good-morning!" and that was really all that she knew about Bud. She had forgotten his existence; and she had been sorrowing because her week at the Ansteds seemed to have accomplished nothing at all.
Her face was averted for a moment from the girls, and some of them, noticing, actually thought that their gay banter was offensive, and was what caused the heightened color on her cheeks as she turned back to them.
They could not have understood, even had she tried to explain, that it was a blush of shame over the thought that the one whom possibly she might have won from that home for the Master's service she had forgotten, and reached out after those whom, possibly, she was not sent to reach. Her eyes were open now; she would do what she could to repair blunders.
"Do with him?" she said, going back to Ruth's last question. "We'll accept him, of course, and set him to work; I should not be greatly surprised if he should prove one of the most useful helpers on our list before the winter is over. Look at the snow coming down, and we have a rehearsal to-night; don't you believe he can shovel paths, as well as make fires?"