"Come in!" said Danny's voice in answer to her knock.
Rosie opened the door and Danny received her with a friendly, "Ah now, and is it yourself, Rosie? I've been waiting for you this half-hour."
He was a little apple-cheeked old man who wheezed with asthma and was half-crippled with rheumatism. "Mary!" he called to some one in another room. "It's Rosie O'Brien. Have you something for Rosie?"
A voice, as serious in tone as Danny's was gay, came back in answer: "Tell Rosie to look on the second shelf of the panthry."
Rosie went to the pantry—it was a little game they had been playing every afternoon—and on the second shelf found a shiny red apple.
"Thanks, Danny. I do love apples."
Danny shook his head lugubriously. "I'm afeared there won't be many more, Rosie. We're gettin' to the bottom of the barrel and summer's comin'. But can't you sit down for a minute and talk to a body?"
Rosie sat down. As she had only two more papers to deliver, she had plenty of time. But she had nothing to say.
Danny, watching her, drew a long face. "What's the matter, Rosie dear? Somebody dead?"
Rosie shook her head and sighed. "That old Otto Schnitzer's waiting for me outside."