Red-Robin | Page 8

over a white duck suit. Where had she seen such a suit before? With a catch at her heart she remembered--at the hospital, that time Dale had been run over. "Oh!" she cried. "My Dan!"
"Mrs. Lynch?" The hospital attendant spoke quickly as one would who had a disagreeable task and must dispose of it without any delay. "Your husband's had an accident--he's alive, but--you'd better come."
Mrs. Lynch stood very still in the centre of the room--her hand clutching her throat as though to stifle the scream that tore it.
"My Dan--hurt!" She trembled but stood very straight. "Quick, Dale, we must go to him. My Dan. No, no, you stay with Beryl. Oh, hurry!" she implored the interne, rushing bareheaded past him down the stairway. "Hurry."
For a few moments Dale stared at the half-open door. In his thirteen years he had experienced the pinch of poverty, even hunger, the pain of injury, but never this overwhelming fear of something, he did not know what. Pop, his big, strong Pop--hurt! Pop, who could swing him even now, that he measured five feet three himself, to his shoulder! Oh, no, no, it could not be true! Someone had made a mistake. Someone had cruelly frightened his mother. Hadn't their luck just come? Hadn't Pop been made a boss?
"Mom-ma!" came Beryl's voice, sleepily, from the other room. "Mom-ma, what's they?" Glad of anything to do Dale rushed to quiet his little sister. He bade her, brokenly, to "never mind and go to sleep," and he pulled the old blanket up tight to her chin, his eyes so blinded with tears that he did not see the waxen head pillowed close to Beryl's.
Then he sat in his mother's chair and dropped his head upon the table and waited, his hands clenched at his side.
"I won't cry! I won't be a baby! Mom'll maybe need me. I'm big now!" he muttered, finding a little comfort in the sound of his own voice.
* * * * *
Poor Robin's Prince; alas, he felt very young and helpless before the trouble which he faced.
Big Dan Lynch, he who had been the fairest and sturdiest of the county of Moira's girlhood, would never work again--as superintendent or even foreman; the rest of his days must be spent in the wheeled chair sent up by the sympathetic Miss Lewis of the Neighborhood Settlement House. It was fixed with a contrivance so that he could move it about the small room.
Little Beryl started school which made up for a great deal that had suddenly been taken from her life, for mother never sat by the lamp, now, or crocheted. She worked at the Settlement House all day and all evening busied herself with her home tasks.
The "lucky dolly" Beryl hid away in paper wrappings. Somehow, young as she was, she knew her mother could not bear the sight of it.
And Dale worked every day at Tony's, going to night school on the evenings when he had used to go to the store. A tightening about the lips, an older seriousness in the lad's eyes alone told what it had cost him to give up his ambition to graduate with his class, perhaps at its head.
Little Robin with the sky-blue eyes was quite forgotten!
CHAPTER III
THE HOUSE OF FORSYTH
It was a time-honored custom at Gray Manor that Harkness should serve tea at half-past four in the Chinese room.
On this day--another November day, ten years after the events of the last chapter--Harkness slipped through the heavy curtains with his tray and interrupted Madame Forsyth, mistress of Gray Manor, in deep confab with her legal advisor, Cornelius Allendyce.
Mr. Allendyce was just saying, crisply, "Will your mind not rest easier for knowing that the Forsyth fortune will go to a Forsyth?" when Harkness rattled the cups.
Then, strangest of all things, Madame ordered him sharply away with his tray.
Such a thing had never happened before in Harkness' experience and he had been at Gray Manor for fifty-five years. He grumbled complainingly to Mrs. Budge, the housekeeper, and to Florrie, Madame's own maid, who was having a sip of tea with Mrs. Budge in the cosy warmth of the kitchen.
Florrie asserted that she could tell them a story or two of Madame's whims and cranks--only it would not become her, inasmuch as Madame was old and a woman to be pitied. "Poor thing, with this curse on the house, who wouldn't have jumps and fidgets? I don't see I'm sure how any of us stand it." But Florrie spoke with a hint of satisfaction--as though proud to serve where there was a "curse." Harkness and Mrs. Budge, who had lived at Gray Manor when things were happier, sighed.
"It's an heir they be talking about now," Harkness admitted.
"You don't say so!" exclaimed Mrs. Budge and Florrie in one breath.
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