“Good Gracious!—­what for?” Her surprise was unfeigned.

“Because he won’t let me give him the Heim Vandyke—­wants to buy it, insists on buying it.  Asked me to let him have it—­and then won’t accept it.  Now, do me a favor, will you?  You make him take it.  You’re the only person who can boss him—­and he likes to have you do it.  Will you see him to-day, and fix it?”

“Well of all!—­Why, I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.  Of course, he ought to take it, if you want to give it to him; but I really don’t see—­I wonder—­” She meditated for a full block in silence.  “I’m going to lunch with him and Miss Gard and Mother.  If I can, I’ll—­no, I can’t.  It’s none of my business.  It’s up to you.  How can I say—­’You ought to do what Teddy says’?  He’d tell me I was an impertinent little girl, and that he knew how he wanted to deal with little boys without being told by their desk-mates.”

Teddy scowled.  He wanted to get back to the barnyard he had left so abruptly, impelled by his new and unaccountable fright.  But having hitched himself to his new subject of conversation, he felt somehow compelled to drag at it.  It was up-hill work.  To be sure, he had come to Dorothy for the purpose of soliciting her help, but Gard and Vandyke had both lost interest.  Against his will he kept on talking.

“Well, I’ve done everything I can to make him see my point of view.  I’ve told him I owe it to him; that Father would want him to have it; that I’ll give his money away if he sends it; that I’ve already shipped the thing to him; that I don’t want it; that it’s unbecoming to my house—­he won’t listen.  Just says he’s sent his cheque and we’ll please change the subject.”

“Well, you don’t have to cash his cheque, do you?” she inquired gravely.

“I know that,” Teddy scoffed.  “But if I don’t, he’ll send it in my name, in cash, to some charity, and that’ll be all the same in the final addition.  He’s so confoundedly resourceful, you can’t think around him.”

“No, you can’t,” she agreed.  “That’s one of the wonderful things about him.  He thinks in his own terms, in terms of you or me, or the janitor, or the President.  He isn’t just himself, he’s everybody.”

“He isn’t thinking in terms of me,” Teddy complained.

She shook her head.  “No,” she smiled wisely, “he’s thinking in terms of himself, this time, and we aren’t big enough to see that, too, and understand.”

They had reached the entrance to the Park and crossed the already crowded Plaza to its quieter walks.  The tender greens of new grass greeted them, and drifts of pink and yellow vaporous color that seemed to overhang and envelop every branch of tree and shrub, like faint spirits of flower and leaf, clustering about and striving to enter the clefts of gray bark, that they might become embodied in tangible and fragile beauty.  Sweet pungent smells of damp earth rose to their nostrils,—­fragrance of reviving things, of stirring sap, of diligent seeds moling their way to light and air.  Mists shifted by softly, now gray, now rainbow-hued, now trailing on the grass, now sifting slowly through reluctant branches that strove to retain them.