"We ARE all very much upset," returned Margaret, more starch in her tone as she remembered not only Penrod's sufferings but a duty she had vowed herself to perform.
"Margaret! YOU don't----"
"Robert," she said firmly and, also, with a rhetorical complexity which breeds a suspicion of pre-rehearsal--"Robert, for the present I can only look at it in one way: when you gave that money to Penrod you put into the hands of an unthinking little child a weapon which might be, and, indeed was, the means of his undoing. Boys are not respon----"
"But you saw me give him the dollar, and you didn't----"
"Robert!" she checked him with increasing severity. "I am only a woman and not accustomed to thinking everything out on the spur of the moment; but I cannot change my mind. Not now, at least."
"And you think I'd better not come in to-night?"
"To-night!" she gasped. "Not for WEEKS! Papa would----"
"But Margaret," he urged plaintively, "how can you blame me for----"
"I have not used the word `blame,'" she interrupted. "But I must insist that for your carelessness to--to wreak such havoc--cannot fail to--to lessen my confidence in your powers of judgment. I cannot change my convictions in this matter--not to-night--and I cannot remain here another instant. The poor child may need me. Robert, good-night."
With chill dignity she withdrew, entered the house, and returned to the sick-room, leaving the young man in outer darkness to brood upon his crime--and upon Penrod.
That sincere invalid became convalescent upon the third day; and a week elapsed, then, before he found an opportunity to leave the house unaccompanied--save by Duke. But at last he set forth and approached the Jones neighbourhood in high spirits, pleasantly conscious of his pallor, hollow cheeks, and other perquisites of illness provocative of interest.
One thought troubled him a little because it gave him a sense of inferiority to a rival. He believed, against his will, that Maurice Levy could have successfully eaten chocolate-creams, licorice sticks, lemon-drops, jaw-breakers, peanuts, waffles, lobster croquettes, sardines, cinnamon-drops, watermelon, pickles, popcorn, ice-cream and sausage with raspberry lemonade and cider. Penrod had admitted to himself that Maurice could do it and afterward attend to business, or pleasure, without the slightest discomfort; and this was probably no more than a fair estimate of one of the great constitutions of all time. As a digester, Maurice Levy would have disappointed a Borgia.
Fortunately, Maurice was still at Atlantic City--and now the convalescent's heart leaped. In the distance he saw Marjorie coming--in pink again, with a ravishing little parasol over her head. And alone! No Mitchy-Mitch was to mar this meeting.
Penrod increased the feebleness of his steps, now and then leaning upon the fence as if for support.
"How do you do, Marjorie?" he said, in his best sick-room voice, as she came near.
To his pained amazement, she proceeded on her way, her nose at a celebrated elevation--an icy nose.
She cut him dead.
He threw his invalid's airs to the winds, and hastened after her.
"Marjorie," he pleaded, "what's the matter? Are you mad?
Honest, that day you said to come back next morning, and you'd be on the corner, I was sick. Honest, I was AWFUL sick, Marjorie! I had to have the doctor----"
"DOCTOR!" She whirled upon him, her lovely eyes blazing.
"I guess WE'VE had to have the doctor enough at OUR house, thanks to you, Mister Penrod Schofield. Papa says you haven't got NEAR sense enough to come in out of the rain, after what you did to poor little Mitchy-Mitch----"
"What?"
"Yes, and he's sick in bed YET!" Marjorie went on, with unabated fury. "And papa says if he ever catches you in this part of town----"
"WHAT'D I do to Mitchy-Mitch?" gasped Penrod.
"You know well enough what you did to Mitchy-Mitch!" she cried. "You gave him that great, big, nasty two-cent piece!"
"Well, what of it?"
"Mitchy-Mitch swallowed it!"
"What!"
"And papa says if he ever just lays eyes on you, once, in this neighbourhood----"
But Penrod had started for home.
In his embittered heart there was increasing a critical disapproval of the Creator's methods. When He made pretty girls, thought Penrod, why couldn't He have left out their little brothers!
