“I will follow the directions,” said he, squirming in his chair.

“Thank you for letting me do it, and for the algebra, and—­good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He immediately abandoned all pretense of working.  To him it seemed that the climax of the turpentine had come instantly; there was no more working up about it than there was about a live red coal.  The mordant tooth bit into his blood; he rose and tramped the floor, muttering savagely to himself.  But he would not pluck the hateful thing off, no, no—­for that would have been an admission that he was wrong in putting it on; and he was never wrong.

So Bylash, reading one of Miss Jibby’s works in the parlor, and pausing for a drink of water at the end of a glorious chapter, found him tramping and muttering.  His flying look dared Bylash to address him, and Bylash prudently took the dare.  But he poured his drink slowly, stealing curious glances and endeavoring to catch the drift of the little Doctor’s murmurings.

In this attempt he utterly failed, because why?  Obviously because the
Doctor cursed exclusively in the Greek and Latin languages.

In five minutes, Queed was upon his work again.  Not that the turpentine was yet dying slowly away, as Fifi had predicted that it would.  On the contrary it burned like the fiery furnace of Shadrach and Abednego.  But One Hour a Day to be given to Bodily Exercise!...  Oh, every second must be made to count now, whether one’s head was breaking into flame or not.

Whatever his faults or foibles, Mr. Queed was captain of his soul.  But the fates were against him to-night.  In half an hour, when the sting—­they called this conflagration a sting!—­was beginning to get endurable and the pencil to move steadily, the door opened and in strode Professor Nicolovius; he, it seemed, wanted matches.  Why under heaven, if a man wanted matches, couldn’t he buy a thousand boxes and store them in piles in his room?

The old professor apologized blandly for his intrusion, but seemed in no hurry to make the obvious reparation.  He drew a match along the bottom of the mantle-shelf, eyeing the back of the little Doctor’s head as he did so, and slowly lit a cigar.

“I’m sorry to see that you’ve met with an accident, Mr. Queed.  Is there anything, perhaps, that I might do?”

“Nothing at all,’thanks,” said Queed, so indignantly that Nicolovius dropped the subject at once.

The star-boarder of Mrs. Paynter’s might have been fifty-five or he might have been seventy, and his clothes had long been the secret envy of Mr. Bylash.  He leaned against the mantel at his ease, blowing blue smoke.

“You find this a fairly pleasant place to sit of an evening, I daresay!” he purred, presently.

The back of the young man’s head was uncompromisingly stern.  “I might as well try to write in the middle of Centre Street.”

“So?” said Nicolovius, not catching his drift.  “I should have thought that—­”