He dismissed a project for seizing upon a fallen branch and running forward to walk beside Mr. Atwater and hold the branch over his venerated head.  All the branches were too wet; and Noble feared that Mr. Atwater might think the picture odd and decline to be thus protected.  Yet he felt that something ought to be done to shelter Julia’s father and perhaps save him from pneumonia; surely there was some simple, helpful, dashing thing that ordinary people couldn’t think of, but that Noble could.  He would do it and not stay to be thanked.  And then, to-morrow evening, not sooner, he would go to Julia and smile and say; “Your father didn’t get too wet, I hope, after all?” And Julia:  “Oh, Noble, he’s talked of you all day long as his ’new Sir Walter Raleigh’!”

Suddenly will-o’-the-wisp opportunity flickered before him, and in his high mood he paused not at all to consider it, but insanely chased it.  He had just reached a crossing, and down the cross street, walking away from Noble, was the dim figure of a man carrying an umbrella.  It was just perceptible that he was a fat man, struggling with seeming feebleness in the wind and making poor progress.  Mr. Atwater, moving up Julia’s Street, was out of sight from the cross street where struggled the fat man.

Noble ran swiftly down the cross street, jerked the umbrella from the fat man’s grasp; ran back, with hoarse sounds dying out behind him in the riotous dusk; turned the corner, sped after Mr. Atwater, overtook him, and thrust the umbrella upon him.  Then, not pausing the shortest instant for thanks or even recognition, the impulsive boy sped onward, proud and joyous in the storm, leaving his beneficiary far behind him.

In his young enthusiasm he had indeed done something for Mr. Atwater.  In fact, Noble’s kindness had done as much for Mr. Atwater as Julia’s gentleness had done for Noble, but how much both Julia and Noble had done was not revealed in full until the next evening.

That was a warm and moonshiny night of air unusually dry, and yet Florence sneezed frequently as she sat upon the “side porch” at the house of her Great-Aunt Carrie and her Great-Uncle Joseph.  Florence had a cold in the head, though how it got to her head was a process involved in the mysterious ways of colds, since Florence’s was easily to be connected with Herbert’s remark that he wouldn’t ever be caught takin’ his death o’ cold sittin’ on the damp grass in the night air just to listen to a lot o’ tooty-tooty.  It appeared from Florence’s narrative to those interested listeners, Aunt Carrie and Uncle Joseph, that she had been sitting on the grass in the night air when both air and grass were extraordinarily damp.  In brief, she had been at her post soon after the storm cleared on the preceding evening, but she had heard no tooty-tooty; her overhearings were of sterner stuff.

“Well, what did Julia say then?” Aunt Carrie asked eagerly.

“She said she’d go up and lock herself in her room and stuff cushions over her ears if grandpa didn’t quit makin’ such a fuss.”