“Where is she?” he asked.
The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise. “Have you still got that bee in your bonnet?” said he.
“Where is she?” repeated the Weeping Scion.
Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid’s-bow of his mouth had straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom aforetime he had stigmatized as a “white-whiskered old goat,” he now addressed as “Sir.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me where she is, sir,” said he patiently.
“Leave it to me,” said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst for the dramatic in real life. “And keep next Sunday night open.”
She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at her studio, of David’s “Doggy” from the “Grass and Asphalt” sketches which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as expressed to his waif of a dog. For the supporting part we borrowed Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and only rehearsal). After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the time to settle accounts, but she never could repay—and so forth and so on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might accept the thanks if not the check. Instead of which I blurted out the truth.
“Oh, Dominie!” said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank within me. “Do you think that was fair? Don’t you know that I never could have taken the money?”
“Precisely. And we had to find a way to make you take it. We couldn’t have you dying on the premises,” I argued with a feeble attempt at jocularity.
“But from him!” she said. “After what had happened—And his mother. How could you let me do it!”