“Twelve dollars,” answered the boy,—­“one for each year.  Because I’m named for him.  It’s my birthday, you know.  But—­but a dollar of it went for the chain and the collar.  How much do you suppose the gentleman would want for Rothsay Lass?”

The kennel-man considered for a moment.  Then he went back to the house, leaving the lad alone at the gate of the run.  Eleven dollars, for a high-pedigreed collie pup, was a joke price.  But no one else wanted Lass, and her feed was costing more every day.  According to Rothsay standards, the list of brood-females was already complete.  Even as a gift, the kennels would be making money by getting rid of the prick-eared “second.”  Wherefore he went to consult with the foreman.

Left alone with Lass, the boy opened the gate and went into the run.  A little to his surprise Lass neither shrank from him nor attacked him.  She danced about his legs in delight, varying this by jumping up and trying to lick his excited face.  Then she thrust her cold nose into the cup of his hand as a plea to be petted.

When the kennel-man came back, the boy was sitting on the dusty ground of the run, and Lass was curled up rapturously in his lap, learning how to shake hands at his order.

“You can have her, the boss says,” vouchsafed the kennel-man.  “Where’s the eleven dollars?”

By this graceless speech Dick Hazen received the key to the Seventh Paradise, and a life-membership in the world-wide Order of Dog-Lovers.

The homeward walk, for Lass and her new master, was no walk at all, but a form of spiritual levitation.  The half-mile pilgrimage consumed a full hour of time.  Not that Lass hung back or rebelled at her first taste of collar and chain!  These petty annoyances went unfelt in the wild joy of a real walk, and in the infinitely deeper happiness of knowing her friendship-famine was appeased at last.

The walk was long for various reasons—­partly because, in her frisking gyrations, Lass was forever tangling the new chain around Dick’s thin ankles; partly because he stopped, every block or so, to pat her or to give her further lessons in the art of shaking hands.  Also there were admiring boy-acquaintances along the way, to whom the wonderful pet must be exhibited.

At last Dick turned in at the gate of a cheap bungalow on a cheap street—­a bungalow with a discouraged geranium plot in its pocket-handkerchief front yard, and with a double line of drying clothes in the no larger space behind the house.

As Dick and his chum rounded the house, a woman emerged from between the two lines of flapping sheets, whose hanging she had been superintending.  She stopped at sight of her son and the dog.

“Oh!” she commented with no enthusiasm at all.  “Well, you did it, hey?  I was hoping you’d have better sense, and spend your check on a nice new suit or something.  He’s kind of pretty, though,” she went on, the puppy’s friendliness and beauty wringing the word of grudging praise from her.  “What kind of a dog is he?  And you’re sure he isn’t savage, aren’t you?”