“It’s half past two,” he warned. “Max, if you don’t behave, Ida will lose her mother as soon as she’s found her. You gink! can’t you see our mother-on-the-side is worn to a frazzle?”
Mrs. Schmitz laughed and started toward the hall. “Goot Seedney!” she called back. “Ida finds already two fine brothers; one, Max, to make her fly mit the clouds; ant Seedney, to hold her to the earth, from which all our life must come. She iss a lucky girl.”
“The nursery is all right for the night,” embarrassed Sydney said by way of changing the subject. “The temperature has dropped; I turned on the heat for the orchids.”
She patted his arm. “Goot boy! Goot night, two goot boys,” she said cheerily in another tone, and left them.
At school the silent prejudice against Max had shown itself in looks, in subtle ways impossible to define, and in the fact that he was omitted from some of the class affairs. Yet as the weeks passed he could feel it decline.
Billy was the best of friends. He told Max that all the “good ones of the bunch” liked him from the day he went back to school and marched boldly up to Walter in the presence of his special friends and said, “Mr. Buckman, when one does wrong the only way he can atone is to make good for it if possible, and live it down. I paid for the food I took, as you know; and I intend to stay in Fifth Avenue High till I graduate. Some day I may get even with you.”
The words were not a menace. Max’s face and tone were kind, greatly puzzling Walter. When he least expected it and in the most astonishing way Walter was to acknowledge that Max was more than even.
It was perhaps two weeks after the musicale that Max and Sydney were at Billy’s, planning and rehearsing some of the details of Billy’s play. It was well on the way toward presentation. He had worked hard, beginning in early autumn, and revising again and again, till at last he had won high commendation from his teacher of English, who had spurred him to write it.
A committee from each high school in the city would hear it, and on their joint decision rested the award of the prize. If Billy won it would be for the honor of his school as well as for himself.