“The Little Red Doctor has found the place.  It’s in New Mexico.  And in the fall she’s going on to the Coast.  He’s almost willing to guarantee that a year of it will make her as strong as ever.  And the hundred dollars a month you allow her besides her traveling expenses will be plenty.  You are a good old thing, Dominie!”

“What you mean is that I’m an old good-thing.  How shall I look,” I demanded bitterly, “when Mayme comes to thank me?”

“No foolisher than you do now, trying to raise unreasonable objections to our perfectly good plans,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie.  “Besides, she won’t.  She knows that your way is to do good by stealth and blush to find it fame, and she’s under pledge to pretend to know nothing about it.”

“Where did the Little Red Doctor raise it?” I queried.

“There are times, Dominie, when your mind has real penetrative power.  Think it over.”

“The Weeping Scion of Wealth and Position!” I cried.  “Did our medical friend blackmail him?”

“Not necessarily.  He only dropped a hint that Mayme’s chance here was rather poorer than a soldier’s going to war, unless something could be done and the Weeping Scion fairly begged to be allowed to do it.  ’Do you think she’d take it from you?’ said the Little Red Doctor, ’after what your mother called her?’ ‘Don’t let her know,’ says our ornamental young weeper.  ’Tell her somebody else is doing it.  Tell her it’s from that white-whiskered old—­from the elderly and handsome gentleman with the benevolent expres—­’”

“Yes:  I know,” I broke in.  “Very good.  I’m the goat.  Lying, hypocrisy, false pretense, fake charity; it’s all one to a sin-seared old reprobate like me.  After it’s over I’ll go around the corner and steal what pennies I can find in Blind Simon’s cup, just to make me feel comparatively respectable and decent again.”

It was no easier than I expected it to be, especially when little Mayme, having come to say good-bye, put her lips close to my ear and tried to whisper something, and cried and kissed me instead.

Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left.  But her letters helped.  They were so exactly like herself!  Even at the first, when things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square, which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and best people in it.  Homesickness!  Poor little, lonely Mayme.  She was reading—­she wrote the Bonnie Lassie—­all the books that the Dominie had listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort.  “Why grow up a Boob,” wrote the philosophic Mayme, “when the lil old world is full of wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?”

Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with distinctly less of spirit.