Poor Nipper! He could only gaze and wonder—that is, when there was no lifting to be done. His tongue forsook him when called upon to answer the simplest remark. When Elizabeth, taking pity upon him, asked about his week's receipts, he answered vaguely that he did not know.
Hearing this, she turned about, bearing a tray full of almond-cake fresh from Mrs. Donnan's hand, and said, "Nipper, do you mean to say you do not keep track of your sales? Why, you will get cheated right and left. Bring the books up to-night and I will go over them for you!"
To Nipper this seemed an opportunity too good to be lost. He imagined their two heads bent over the records of the down town shop, and perhaps also in time a corresponding approachment of ideas.
Beautiful dream! Foredoomed to failure, however. For Elizabeth, after a few questions, took up the books to her own room, and on the morrow furnished the disappointed Nipper with a few startling statistics as to receipts and expenditure.
"And what would you advise me to do?" said Nipper humbly.
"Oh, I don't know," said Elizabeth. "Ask Hugh John from the House in the Wood. He will tell you, if anybody can. He advised me to come to help your mother. If it had not been for him, I should not have been here now!"
The gleam of jealousy (which is yellow, and not green) in his eyes altered Nipper's countenance completely.
"Ah, Hugh John indeed!" he thought. That, then, was the explanation, was it? This coldness was owing to Hugh John—a boy, little more than a boy—while he, Nipper, was a man, a Councillor, with a shop and income of his own!
Yet he remembered, when he was already well-nigh Hugh John's present age, and the cock of all Edam, tying a pale-faced, determined little boy to a ring in a wall down in the dungeon of an ancient castle. He had determined then to make the cub give in, and there had been some sick work with string-twisting and wire-pincers. He did not care to think about that. But even then the cub had beaten them all. They had been good friends since—that is, in a way. But was it written in the Book of Fate (in which Nipper believed) that they should fight for the mastery on another and far more dangerous arena? It seemed preposterous, but still—well, he would see Hugh John and put the case to him, as Elizabeth had said.
Then, so Nipper told himself, he would know! Well—he might—supposing that Hugh John had been even as the young butcher, blushing half-a-mile away when a lissom, upright form and gait as of wind-blown corn told the world the important news (for Nipper Donnan) that Elizabeth Fortinbras was coming up the street in a hurry.