“For the doctor, with Pretoria’s love.”
Murchison took the flowers tenderly in his strong, deft hand.
“Who’s spoiling me, I should like to know? Aren’t they beauties? Supposing I put two in my button-hole? Thank you, little one,” and he bent and kissed the child’s forehead.
“You won’t drop ’em in the street, sir?”
The pathetic touch of unconscious cynicism went to the man’s heart.
“What, lose my flowers! You wait, miss, to see whether I don’t wear some of them to-morrow.”
The little white face beamed.
“You’re that kind to humor the kid, sir,” quoth Mrs. Bains, with feeling, as she followed Murchison down the stairs.
An hour later Mr. William Bains was hanging his clean face over the garden fence as an example to the neighbors, when a smart victoria stopped at the upper end of Mill Lane. A dapper gentleman sprang out, and came quickly down the footway as though the reek of the tannery disgusted his polite nostrils. He glanced right and left with stiff-necked dissatisfaction, his sleek, fashionable figure reminding one of some aristocratic fragment of Sheraton plumped down amid battered oddments in some dealer’s shop.
Mr. William Bains scanned him, and grunted, noting the effeminate sag of the shoulders and the glint of the patent-leather boots. There was a certain insolent gentility in the dapper figure that made the man of the brawny fore-arms feel an instinctive and workman-like contempt.