The young woman smiled again, but the look she gave him was a puzzled one. And then, quite naturally, she sank, down on the grass, on the other side of Mr. Bentley's hat, watching the game for a while in silence.
“What a tyrant!” she exclaimed. Another uproar had been quelled, and two vigorously protesting runners sent back to their former bases.
“Oh, a benevolent tyrant,” Mr. Bentley corrected her. “Mr. Hodder has the gift of managing boys,—he understands them. And they require a strong hand. His generation has had the training which mine lacked. In my day, at college, we worked off our surplus energy on the unfortunate professors, and we carried away chapel bells and fought with the townspeople.”
It required some effort, she found, to imagine this benevolent looking old gentleman assaulting professors.
“Nowadays they play baseball and football, and box!” He pointed to the boxing gloves on the grass. “Mr. Hodder has taught them to settle their differences in that way; it is much more sensible.”
She picked off the white clover-tops.
“So that is Mr. Hodder, of St. John's,” she said.
“Ah, you know him, then?”
“I've met him,” she answered quietly. “Are these children connected with his church?”
“They are little waifs from Dalton Street and that vicinity,” said Mr. Bentley. “Very few of them, I should imagine, have ever been inside of a church.”