Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/83

She was. Gradually the memory of that humiliating moment of weakness faded, and Tony, ungrateful small wretch that he was, though outwardly still adamant, began to listen for her footstep and regret the moment when she folded her work or shut the book, and said:

“There’s the Professor: I must go.”

She prevailed upon Winthrop to sit with the boy for half an hour in the evenings after dinner—a real self-sacrifice, this, for the evening spent with her husband was the crown of the whole day, and she would have loved to make a third in the little room upstairs, but resolutely stayed away. Tony grew to love these half-hours, and the Professor enjoyed them too. Boys had quite as much attraction for him as they had for Alison, and his manner with them was charming. His classes adored him, and night by night Tony thawed and expanded, little by little. The boy’s own nameless attraction, which had so often stood him in good stead before, had its effect upon Winthrop too. He laughed when his wife insisted on a mystery surrounding their protégé, but he granted that the boy was really interesting. Their first conversation established a close bond. Tony had repeated his desire to earn something, and the Professor considered the matter seriously for a moment or two, then suggested:

“Do you think you could manage to do some copying for me? I think we could arrange a sort of writing-table for you, now you’re partly propped up like that. What sort of a hand do you write?”

Pretty fair, Tony thought—quite legible, anyway.

“That’s the main thing. I write pretty well for a Professor, my wife tells me, but the notes I make for my lectures are too haphazard to send to the typist, so I might set you to making decent copies of them, if you like. . . . That’s all right, then. You won’t find it such uninteresting work either, if you care for books at all.”