Part 11 (2/2)

Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.

”I believe if I were you,” she said, ”I'd carry an umbrella such scorching days as this. n.o.body'd think anything of it. I don't see why a minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol.”

Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. ”I suppose people really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,” he remarked. Then, holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding himself in the shade, and looked about him.

”Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone, than mother had in her whole yard,” he said, after a little. ”Let's see--I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others.”

Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of interest.

They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable number of other plants he saw about him.

”I had no idea we were so well provided as all this,” he commented at last. ”Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You were lucky in following such people.”

”Van Sizers!” echoed Alice, with contempt. ”All they left was old tomato cans and clamsh.e.l.ls. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself, all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall.”

”Good for you!” exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him to ask, ”But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?”

”Some few,” responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.

”Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good enough to send me--from his garden.”

”I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden,” said Theron. ”I thought he lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there.”

”Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS,” explained Alice; ”but it's a big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes.” She went on with a little laugh: ”I didn't like to question him too closely, for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have another big batch of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on; I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one in this Octavius who isn't all self!”

”Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow,” said Theron. ”I wish he was a professing member.” Then some new thought struck him. ”Alice,” he exclaimed, ”I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do.”

”Aren't you too tired now?” suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.

”No, the sooner the better,” he replied, moving now toward the gate.

”Well,” she began, ”if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about--that is, I--but never mind.”

”What is it?” asked her husband.

”Nothing whatever,” replied Alice, positively. ”It was only some nonsense of mine;” and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim, went off down the street again.

CHAPTER XII

The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.

Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.

”Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?” he asked, as he seated himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound doc.u.ments in bundles which crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.

Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked in the fading light to be half-dried plants.

”Well, I don't know--I rather guess not,” he made answer, as he pursued his task. ”So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway,” he went on, ”I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have to earn money, you know.”

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