Stowell shook his head.
“You’d never guess,” howled Reeves, “never in a thousand years! He was—was—oh, golly!—he was knitting!”
“Knitting!” It was a chorus of three incredulous voices.
“Yes, knitting! Knitting blue-woolen mittens!”
“By Jove!” muttered Stowell.
Clinton and Hazlett burst into peals of laughter.
“You—you ought to have seen his expression when he saw that I wasn’t Mrs. Brannigan,” went on “Chick,” wiping the tears from his eyes. “He stared and got as red as a beet; then he tried to get the thing out of sight. Of course, I apologized for intruding when he was busy, and he said it didn’t matter. And after a while he told me all about it. Seems he lives up in the backwoods—or whatever you call ’em—in Michigan; up among the lumber-camps, you know. His father’s dead, he told me, and his mother keeps a sort of hotel or boarding-house or something. Of course,” added “Chick,” with a note of apology in his voice, “that isn’t funny. But it seems that when he was a kid they taught him to knit, and made him do socks and mittens and things. I’ve forgotten a lot of it, but he wanted to go to college and hadn’t any money to speak of, and so they borrowed a little somewhere—enough for tuition—and now he’s trying to make enough on mittens to pay his board. He gets his room free for teaching some of the little Brannigans, I believe. He’s spunky, isn’t he? But I thought I’d keel over on the floor when I saw him sitting there for all the world like an old granny in the Christmas pictures, just making those needles fly. Maybe he can’t knit!”
“And then what?” asked Stowell, quietly.
“Chick’s” grin faded out a little.