LET me tell the worst of the Little Red Doctor at once and get it over with. He has a hair-trigger temper and a jaw that does not forget or forgive readily. He insists on regarding gravely many things which most of us treat flippantly, such as love and death. He has a brutal disregard of the finesse of illness and never gives, even to an old man and an old patient like myself, medicine unless one needs it. For the rest, the nickname which Our Square gave him long since describes him. One thing more; though he is our friend and fellow and counselor, the safe repository of our secrets, our sturdy defender against the final enemy, yet Our Square does not call him “Doc.” There is something about him which forbids. You would have to see him to understand.

Seeing him, you would not see very much. Nature has done a slack job with the Little Red Doctor's outside. Even the Bonnie Lassie, stickler though she is for the eminence of nature as an artist, heretically admits this. She tried to better it in sculpture, and by force of the genius in her slim fingers she did succeed in getting at the dominant meaning of those queer quirks in his queer face—quirks of humor, of compassion, of sympathy—and thereby in expressing something of his fiery tenderness, his intrepid wisdom, his inclusive charity of heart toward good and bad alike, the half-boyish, half-knightly valor of self-sacrifice which arms him in the lists for the endless combat with his unconquerable antagonist, “my old friend, Death.” With her happy sense of character she called her miniature bronze “The Idealist,” and refused to sell it because, she said, some day Our Square would want to put up a monument to the Little Red Doctor and her attempt might help some bigger artist to be worthy of the task.

“Do you know,” she observed to Cyrus the Gaunt the day that she finished, “I've discovered something about that face? There's no happiness in it. And it so deserves happiness!”

“Some fool of a girl probably turned him down and he came here to bury himself,” surmised Cyrus the Gaunt. “We homely, good men are never properly appreciated. Look at me!”

The Bonnie Lassie looked at him and then kissed him on the ear. “Just the same I think you're wrong,” she said thoughtfully. “When I first saw the Little Red Doctor, I wondered whether any woman could possibly love him. Since I've known him I've wondered how any woman could possibly help it.”

“That's a pleasant thing for a man to hear from his wife,” observed Cyrus cheerfully. “Anyway, there's a photograph been scraped out of the inside of his watch. Mendel, the watchmaker, told Polyglot Elsa so.”

Barring this tenuous evidence, whatever may have passed in the Little Red Doctor's former existence was wholly unknown to Our Square, even after he became one of us. He trailed no clouds of glory and apparently no clues from his previous existence. All that we knew was that he landed from a long voyage in tropical lands and set up his shingle, “Dr. Smith,” at No. 11. Business did not rush to him. We are a conservative and cautious community in Our Square. We watched and weighed him. Presently he got a little foothold in the reeking slum tenements which surround our struggling and cherished respectability. It could not have been a profitable practice. But it afforded experience. Sometimes he came back with triumph in his face; sometimes with stern gloom; sometimes with a black eye, for the practice of medicine as carried on in our immediate environment involves sundry departments not taught in the schools, and branches out into strange and eclectic activities. In those early days I overheard Terry the Cop assert that the new physician could “lick his weight in wildcats.” But when I informed Terry that this would mean at least five of the species, Terry replied airily that he was no Zoo attendant, but he knew a scrapper when he saw one.

If one may credit the Murphy family, the Little Red Doctor gained his real foothold in Our Square through force, invasion, violence, and brutal assault. The Murphys occupy the ground floor of the corner house abutting on Our Alley, under the workroom of Dead-Men's-Shoes, who, through their unwitting instrumentality, became sponsor for the Little Red Doctor. Dead-Men's-Shoes comes by his name from his business, which is the purchase and resale of the apparel of the recently deceased, collected on wagon trips over a wide radius about New York. Thus it comes about that the feet of the mighty have been represented in Our Square, and more than one of us has worn the giant's robe as tailored on Fifth Avenue. The ol'-clo' man's real name is Dadmun SchÜtz, and he is a Yankee from Connecticut where there are many Dadmuns and more Schutzes, but how and why he came to Our Square is a story that I do not care to tell. The slight alteration in his name to fit his trade was so logical as to be inevitable. Dead-Men's-Shoes is tall and rugged and powerful and slow, and he always wears an extinct species of silk hat on his business rounds. In the day which introduced him to the Little Red Doctor, the Murphys had declared holiday and gone fishing and caught fish. Naturally they held alcoholic celebration in the evening. Passing the house, the Little Red Doctor heard the sounds of revelry; also another sound which checked his progress. He stuck his head in at the window, took a hasty survey, followed the head into the room and laid hands upon Timmy Murphy aetat ten. Astonished but in no way dismayed by the invasion, Paterfamilias Murphy immediately threw a whiskey bottle at the intruder and rushed to the rescue, followed by the partner of his bosom. It was no time for diplomacy or fine distinctions as to the rights of the non-combatant sex. The Little Red Doctor acted with promptitude and both hands, and the Murphys came to in the kitchen with the door barred against reËntry. Thereupon they raised such lamentable outcry that Dad-mun SchÜtz loped downstairs to the rescue. Seeing a stranger in the act of throttling the scion of the house of Murphy, the ol'-clo' man undertook to dissuade him by fixing a bony hand in his collar; but in so doing forgot the existence of what is technically termed, I understand, the pivot blow. Upon discovering its uses he lay down in the hallway to meditate upon it. The Little Red Doctor finished his job before Terry the Cop's substitute arrived to arrest him. He went peacefully. Dead-Men's-Shoes followed to the court, escorting Murphy senior, who was extensively bandaged. The bench was occupied and ornamented by Magistrate Wolfe Tone Hanrahan, the Irish Solon of Avenue B. Judge Hanrahan possesses a human stratum in his judicial temperament. His examination of the prisoner (suppressed from the stenographer's official notes) proceeded as follows:—

The Judge—What were you doing in Murphys' flat?

The Accused—I was there professionally.

The Judge—Professionally, say ye? (With a look at the ill-repaired Murphys.) Are ye a prize-fighter?

The Accused—I am a physician and surgeon.

The Judge—Mostly surgeon, I'm thinkin'. Ye seem to have removed three teeth from the patient an' partly ampytated an ear. Besides, he swears ye tried to murder the boy. Is such yer usual practice?

The Accused—The boy had a fish bone in his throat. He was strangling. Here is the bone. The boy is in bed. I ought to be with him now.

The Judge—Officer, ye're a fool. Murphy, y' oughta get ten days. Mrs. Murphy, back to yer child! Defendant, cud ye come to my house, No. 36, to-morra mornin'? My cook has a bile on her neck. I like yer style. Yere discharged.

Dead-Men's-Shoes escorted the physician back apologizing at every step, and thenceforth touted for him (greatly to his embarrassment) until Our Square grew afraid to call in any other practitioner lest the partisan ol'-clo' man should accuse us of attempted suicide by negligence. Within a year of his arrival the little Red Doctor had become, as it were, official healer to the whole place. And where he began as physician he ended as friend and ally.

The Little Red Doctor was intensely personal in his permanent engagement with his old friend, Death.

While I am, of course, a part of the Little Red Doctor's large practice, I do not add much to his meager income. In fact, he usually laughs me and my minor ailments out of court and declines to administer anything but free advice. On the particular June evening when I unwittingly became a partner of the fates, nothing really ailed me except that I had not been sleeping for some nights and was tired of it. The Little Red Doctor went over me briefly and prescribed.

“One full day in the open sunrise to sundown.”

“Where?”

He reflected. “Go crÊpe-hunting with Dead-Men's-Shoes,” he said at length.

Thus it was that from nine o'clock on, of a balmy, sweet-scented morning, the sleek and raucous automobiles of West-Chester County hooted disdainfully at Dadmun SchÜtz and myself, jogging appreciatively along behind Schutz's mouse-hued mare, Dolly Gray, through a world so alien to Our Square as to suggest another scheme of creation; a world of birds and butterflies and bees and trees and flowers and song and color and blithe winds.

This world was, most appropriately, inhabited by a brown-and-gold fairy. Any one could tell that she was a fairy by the sunlight in her hair, and the starlight in her eyes, and the fact that, at the moment when we discovered her, two butterflies were engaged in aerial combat to decide winch one should settle on the pink rose above her ear. The flower flaunted there like a challenge against the somberness of her costume, for the fairy was dressed entirely in black. She was leaning on a gate in a tall hedge. Through the opening we could see, across broad flower gardens, a solid, spacious, kindly house, amid rustling shade, flying the insignium of death at its door.

At the sight Dead-Men's-Shoes pulled up and took off his extinct hat. It was one of the most extinct hats wherewith I have ever known him to grace his calling. Its brim was fractured in two places, its crown leaned like Pisa's Tower, and it bristled in universal offense against the outer world. Despite all this it was indisputably a Silk Hat, and, as such, official to the lawful occasions of the wearer. The brown-and-gold fairy looked at it with unfeigned surprise. From its interior Dead-Men's-Shoes extracted a slip of paper which he perused. He then addressed the fairy in a soft and respectful tone.

“You ain't on the list, mum.”

“What list?” inquired the fairy with interest. “And why should I be on it?”

“Not you, mum. The house.”

He re-covered his head and contemplated her speculatively. She returned his regard with sparkling eyes and a dimpling and twitching mouth.

“Why do you wear that extraordinary hat?” she broke out.

“Business,” murmured Dead-Men's-Shoes. “It's my business hat. If I could have a few words with you on business?”

“You've come at an unfortunate time,” said the brown-and-gold fairy. “There is a death in the family.”

“Yessum. I observed that the Grim Reaper had visited the premises,” said Dead-Men's-Shoes, who prides himself upon a stock of correct, elegant, and felicitous mortuary phrases. “May I proffer my humble condolences?” He removed the silk hat with an official and solemn flourish. “Are you the bereaved, mum?”

“The what?”

“The relic of the late lamented?”

“No; only a cousin, but my father and I are Mr. Bennington's nearest relatives. What is it you wish?”

“In that case,” said Dead-Men's-Shoes, with evident relief, “an' beggin' your pardon for intrudin' on your nach'ral grief an' distress, we might trade.” He coughed austerely. “About clothes now,” he suggested.

“Clothes? What clothes?” said the fairy.

“The deceased's. Or shoes, maybe? Or even hats.”

“What on earth do you mean, you extraordinary person?”

“I mean fair,” said Dead-Men's-Shoes firmly. “I'm here to buy the deceased's garments. You see, lady, I read all the death notices in the N'York papers, an' when I've got ten or a dozen good prospects in one locality I hitch up Dolly Gray an' make my rounds. An' though you ain't on my list, I won't count that against you when we come to dicker.”

“But we don't want to sell Cousin Ben's clothes,” said the fairy in bewilderment.

“Dont-cha!” Dead-Men's Shoes took on a persuasively argumentative air. “Listen, lady. Wotcha goin' to do with them garments?”

“I hadn't thought about it.”

“Was the late lamented a charitable gent? Good to the poor and that sort of thing?”

“Very.”

“There you are, then!” said he triumphantly. “Sell me the garments for a lot o' money. I'm soft on swell garments. Take the cash an' give it to charity. Le's begin with shoes. How many pair of shoes woild you say the untimely victim had?” Mirth quivered at the corners of the fairy's soft lips, “He wasn't an untimely victim. He was seventy-six years old and he had gout so dreadfully that he had to have one shoe made much longer than the other.”

My companion's face fell, but immediately brightened with hope. “Which foot?”

She considered. “The left.”

“If they was right in size an' price,” he mused, “they might do for the Little Red Doctor.”

The brown-and-gold fairy's eyes widened. “For whom?” she asked.

“The Little Red Doctor.”

“Why do you call him that?”

“Because he's little an' red-headed an' the smartest doctor in N'York. An' if your loved-an'-lost one had had him, he'd be alive to-day,” he added with profound conviction.

“Where does he live?”

“Down in Our Square—No. 11, on the East Side; office hours nine to one. If you was any ways ailin' you couldn't do better'n to call.”

“And there is something the matter with his left foot?” she pursued, ignoring this well-meant advice. “What?”

“It's dummed hard to fit,” replied Dead-Men's-Shoes disconsolately.

“I can tell you,” I interjected. “He injured it while swimming.”

“Oh!” said the brown-and-gold fairy. “And—and this gentleman's description of him is accurate?”

“But not adequate,” I said. “He is wise (a confirmatory nod from the brown-and-gold fairy) and brave (another nod) and unselfish (a third nod) and obstinate (two nods) and beautiful—”

“Oh!” said the brown-and-gold fairy, with obvious disappointment.

“—to us who know him, I mean.” She smiled up at me. “And his name is Smith.”

“It is,” I averred.

At this juncture Dead-Men's-Shoes, who had been fidgeting on his wagon seat, deemed it time to interfere in the interests of commerce. “Don't butt in, dominie,” he protested in an injured aside. “These mourners has to be handled with tac'. It takes a professional. You're spoilin' trade.”

Herein he did me injustice. The brown-and-gold fairy threw the gate open and invited Dead-Men's-Shoes in to bargain. Highly advantageous bargaining it was, I judged from the ill-suppressed jubilance of my associate's face when he emerged some minutes later, tottering under a burden of assorted clothing, while she brought up the rear, carrying one pair of shoes. The rose was gone from her hair.

“Remember,” she cautioned him, “the suits you may dispose of as you please, but the shoes are to go to the—the Little Red Doctor just as they are. Will you see that they do?” She appealed to me.

“I'll take them myself,” I promised.

“Will you? That's kind of you. But you mustn't tell him where they came from.” She looked up at me and I seemed to discern something wistful in her eyes. “You are a friend of Dr. Smith's?”

“Yes. And you?”

“I used to be,” said she indifferently. Dead-Men's-Shoes climbed into the wagon and lifted the lines. “Accept the assurances of my respec'ful sympathy,” he recited, “an' remember the address if there's anything further in my line. Wake up, Dolly Gray.”

The brown-and-gold fairy floated out through the gate and came to my side.

“Does he still limp?” she asked in a half whisper.

“Imperceptibly,” I answered.

“I don't want him to limp,” she cried imperiously and was gone.

Dolly Gray took us and the shoes of the deceased cousin on our way. The day's journey ended in front of the Little Red Doctor's office. The Little Red Doctor looked up from some sort of complicated mechanism which he was making for crippled Molly Rankin (who could never by any possibility pay him for it) and appeared astonished at the sight of the very elegant footwear which Dead-Men's-Shoes extended to him.

“What for?” he asked. “I'm not buying second-hand shoes.”

“Ask the dominie,” said Dead-Men's Shoes.

“They're a present,” I explained.

The Little Red Doctor looked both puzzled and suspicious. “They won't fit my queer foot,” he objected.

“Try,” encouraged Dead-Men's-Shoes.

The Little Red Doctor tried on the left boot. “Pretty good,” he said. He stood up to stamp his foot down. Then he bounded into the air like a springbok, and on alighting, tore off the shoe, saying something harsh and profane about practical jokers. “There's a pin in it,” he growled.

“Gosh!” exclaimed Dead-Men's-Shoes, greatly perturbed at this evidence of woman's perfidy. “An' her in the sollim presence of death, too!”

“Her? Who?” demanded the Little Red Doctor, looking up from his explorations after the pin.

“Dadmun,” said I, “you are too loquacious. Go out and look after Dolly Gray.”

Duly impressed and oppressed by my well-chosen word, the ol'-clo' man trudged out and leaned against the railing. The Little Red Doctor extracted a small object from the shoe. It proved to be a pink rose, impaled upon a fine golden wire which might once have been a hairpin. The wire held in place a thin strip of paper. When he saw the handwriting on the paper the Little Red Doctor gave another leap. It was not as athletic and deerlike as his first, but was still a creditable performance. Then he flung the whole combination out through the open window.

“Ow!” ejaculated Dead-Men's-Shoes from his place against the railing.

We could hear him scuffling around after the missile, which had evidently hit him on a tender spot. His voice came clearly to us reading painfully in the dim light.

“'An'-no-bird-sings-in-Arcady!'”

“Dadmun,” said I, severely, “that letter is not addressed to you.”

“It ain't a letter,” retorted Dead-Men's-Shoes aggrievedly. “It ain't begun like a letter oughta be. It ain't signed, like a letter oughta be. It's just that one fool line. Where's Arcady an' what's to stop the birds singin' there if they want to? Here's yer valentine.”

He flipped it back through the window. We heard the creaking of the wagon springs, Dolly Gray's patient, responsive grunt and her retreating footsteps on the asphalt. I retrieved the carrier rose and turned to the Little Red Doctor.

“Well?” I said. “Where is Arcady, my friend?”

He shook his head.

“I know that song,” I continued. “How does the verse run?

“Don't!” said the Little Red Doctor hoarsely. “I used to know that song.” He lifted haggard eyes to me. “You've seen her?”

“Yes.”

“How did she look?”

I meditated. “Like a child that doesn't understand why it isn't happy,” I said at length.

I saw the Little Red Doctor's sensitive mouth quiver; but the jaw set hard and firm and ended that struggle.

“I won't ask you where,” he said.

“It would be no use. I couldn't tell you.”

“No.” He accepted that. “Then why, in the name of Heaven,” he cried, looking at the rose, “should she—Oh, well, never mind that.” He sat thoughtfully for a time. “Dominie,” he said, “I'm going to tell you. It will do me good, I think. And then I'll forget it again.”

It was not altogether a pretty story. Four years before, it began, when the brown-and-gold fairy must have been little more than a child. At a fashionable cottage place which is merely a glowing, newspaper-glorified name to Our Square, the Little Red Doctor, who had come down for a tennis tournament, had jumped off a pier after a small boy who had fallen in. He referred to it and to the brown-and-gold fairy's romantic view of it with tolerant contempt. “The hee-ro business,” he said with the medical man's disdain of the more obvious forms of physical peril. “I run more real risks every day of my life.” However, a well-meaning but blundersome launch had broken his foot with its wheel, and the girl, who had seen the whole adventure, carried him off in her motor-car. Followed the usual discovery of friends in common, and by the time the crutches were discarded, the victim was hopelessly enslaved. Whether they were ever actually engaged or not did not clearly appear. The Little Red Doctor was carefully and gallantly defensive of her course. Nevertheless, knowing the Little Red Doctor as I do, I was resentfully sure that she had treated him shamefully. Finally there was an issue of principle between them. He alluded to it vaguely. “She didn't really care, of course,” he said. “Why should she? So I went away and knocked about the world for a bit. Then I came here because in Our Square there wouldn't be much chance of meeting her, you see. There's just one thing to do. Forget her. So I've forgotten her.” And the Little Red Doctor, taking the rose from the table where I had tossed it, held it cherishingly in his hands as if it were a human, beating heart.

“Forget her.” Quite so! It was just and simple and sensible. Yet, while I agreed heartily, I had my private misgivings that it might not be so easy to forget a face with that particular quality of witchery about it, a witchery wholly distinct from mere beauty. I've known quite homely women to have it. Not that the brown-and-gold fairy was homely. But I cannot quite think that she was beautiful, either, by the standards of calm and balanced judgment. Only, the calmest judgment would be put to it to preserve its balance with those eyes turned upon it. She had an unbalancing personality, that brown-and-gold fairy, even to an old and rusty-fusty pedagogue like myself.

In fact, she was quite unreasonably vivid to my thoughts for weeks after my one brief meeting with her. I believe that I was actually thinking about her and the Little Red Doctor, seated on my favorite bench in Our Square, on the August morning when a small, soft voice quite close behind me said:—

“Mr. Dominie.”

I got up and turned around. There stood the brown-and-gold fairy. I frowned upon her severely. Not as severely as she doubtless deserved, considering how the Little Red Doctor had winced at the mention of her, but as severely as was practicable in the face of the way she was smiling at me.

“What do you mean by coming up behind me and startling me with your 'Mr. Dominie'?” I demanded.

“I heard the man with the funny hat call you that. Isn't it your name?”

“It will serve. What are you doing in Our Square?”

“I came down to see the place.”

“You came down to see the Little Red Doctor,” I charged.

“Oh, no,” she protested softly. “Just to see the place where he lives. I went near there, but he came out and I ran away.”

“You needn't have,” I said. “He has forgotten you.”

“I don't think it nice of you to say that, Mr. Dominie.”

There was a little break in her voice. I looked away hastily. Though, if I had made her cry, it served her right. I looked back and found that she was not crying. She was laughing. At me!

“He has forgotten you,” I repeated positively, “as he ought.”

“Yes; I suppose he ought,” she assented dolorously. “But he hasn't,” she added with a sudden change to an adorable impertinence. “You know he hasn't. Nobody ever forgets me. You didn't forget me, did you? And you'd only seen me once.”

“Why am I seeing you now?”

“Because you're old and wise and you look kind.”

“I am very old and extremely wise,” I answered, “but my kindly expression is mere senile deterioration of the facial muscles. I am really brutal.”

“But you'll be kind to me,” she averred trustfully.

I surrendered. “What about?”

“I want to see the—the Little Red Doctor, and yet I—I don't want to see him. Do you know what I mean?”

“No. Do you?”

“N-n-no. I suppose I don't exactly. Do you think he'd like to see me?”

“I'm sure he wouldn't.”

Her lip quivered. “And you said you'd be kind to me,” she murmured plaintively.

“Not at all! You said I'd be kind to you. Are you in love with the Little Red Doctor?”

“Of course I'm not!” she asserted violently.

“Then why are you here in Our Square at all? Does the scenery entice you? Are you enthralled by our social advantages? Would you like to meet some of our leading local lights?”

“I would like to meet somebody who is really wise and kind, too wise and kind to make fun of poor little me.”

“That's the Bonnie Lassie,” said I with sudden, inspired conviction. “Come with me.

“Where?” asked the brown-and-gold fairy, hanging back doubtfully.

“To her studio where she sculps wonderful and beautiful things. If I'm any judge she'll sculp you as a butterfly that's lost its way in this wicked—”

“I'm not a butterfly,” interrupted my companion. “I'm a very serious person on a very serious errand.”

“—world,” I proceeded. “And she'll talk to you about the Little Red Doctor—”

“Will she?” murmured the brown-and-gold fairy, moving after me.

“—whom she loves devotedly—”

“Does she!” said the brown-and-gold fairy, stopping short.

“—as every one in Our Square does and ought to—”

“Oh!” remarked the fairy, catching up with me again.

“—for reasons which you should know as well as any one.”

“I don't,” retorted the fairy, mutinously. “Who is the Bonnie Lassie? You all have such queer names here, Mr. Dominie!”

“In private life she's Mrs. Cyrus Staten: otherwise Cecily Willard.”

The golden lights in the fairy's eyes deepened with astonishment. “Not the famous Miss Willard who does the figurines! Does she live way down here in this—this—”

“Slum,” I supplied. “Don't be afraid to say it. Our Square isn't sensitive to what outsiders think of us.”

“This nice, queer old park,” concluded the fairy with dignity. “And I suppose she is very old and wise and—is she kind?”

“She is very young and lovely to look at and as wise as she needs to be for her own happiness and—come along and see her.”

“But you mustn't tell her—'' was as far as she got when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the studio with a smudge of clay on the tip of her chin, and regarded my pink and captive fairy with undisguised amazement.

“This young discovery of mine,” I explained, “has come to Our Square for the purpose of not seeing the Little Red Doctor. Dead-Men's-Shoes struck up a professional acquaintance with her in the country and told her about the Doctor—whom she doesn't want to see—being in Our Square. As she hasn't seen him for several years and as he has been trying hard and conscientiously to forget her, she has come, incognita, where he is, in order to keep on not seeing him and to discover whether he has forgotten. It's all just as simple as it sounds.”

My fairy suddenly became a person, and a very decided person. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I am not incognita. My name is Ethel Bennington, and I think you are a very unkind old man.”

The Bonnie Lassie set a slender, strong hand on the visitor's wrist and drew her within. “Never mind him, my dear,” she said softly. “He isn't really unkind. He's just a tease.” She paused and studied her caller a moment. Then, with her irresistible smile, she said: “I know it's dreadful of me—but, would you mind if I just sketched you hastily?”

Now, that may have been the artist of it breaking through, or it may have been just the way of her invincible tact and management; you never can tell, with the Bonnie Lassie. But it's a proven fact that nobody can sit to her without giving up his heart's secrets, and sometimes she puts them in the bronze. Most unfairly I was banished, for the brown-and-gold fairy with a flush of pleasure said she'd sit at once. And from that sitting grew another sitting and another and many to follow. Sometimes I was bidden in. It was a sheer delight to sit there and watch those two young creatures, the sculptress gay and sunny and splendid in the glad beauty of power and achievement; the model, wistful, sweet, and vivid by turns, a fairy from a brighter world bringing her fairy gold to our grim and dusty neighborhood. Out of a working silence the brown-and-gold fairy spoke one day.

“Is he poor?”

“Is who—” I began.

But the quicker apprehension of the artist cut in on me.

“It isn't exactly a fashionable practice, the Little Red Doctor's. Is it, dominie?”

“No. But poor—certainly not, by the standards of Our Square. He has a new black suit for professional service every year.”

“Um!” said the fairy doubtfully. Then, after a pause, “He could have been rich, you know.”

“Could he?” said the Bonnie Lassie, holding her iron poised over the shadow of a flying dimple.

“An invention. Something to do with his surgery,” explained the girl. “Father said there were big possibilities in it. He offered to finance it himself. But he—the Lit—Dr. Smith wouldn't even take out a patent on it.”

The Bonnie Lassie lowered her weapon. “Do you mean the pressure brace for atrophy?”

“Yes,” said the girl, surprised. “How do you know about it?”

“Cyrus's uncle—he's Dr. Hardaman, the great orthopedic surgeon—says that there are thousands of children walking to-day who owe their legs to that brace of the Little Red Doctor's.”

“You never told any of us about that!” I cried.

“No,” she answered composedly. “It seemed to make the Little Red Doctor uncomfortable when Cyrus spoke of it. So we kept it quiet.”

“You see, he might really have made a fortune by patenting it,” said the brown-and-gold fairy.

“That is what I asked Uncle Charles. He said that physicians, the best type, don't take out patents. You see, the patent would have made the brace cost more, and the more it cost the fewer people could buy it, and that would mean more children who ought to have walked and couldn't. And, oh, my dear! if you could see the poor, pitiful, wee things as we see them in Our Square, withered and hobbling like old, worn-out folk —”

“Don't! Don't!” cried the girl. “I—I never thought of it that way.”

“Why should you? But the Little Red Doctor would.”

“Yes, but he didn't explain it that way,” said the brown-and-gold fairy miserably. “He said something stupid about ethics, and I said something I didn't mean—and,”—her head drooped,—“and that was our last quarrel.”

“And you loved him all the time, and still do,” said the Bonnie Lassie gently.

“I didn't! I don't!” denied the brown-and-gold fairy vehemently.

“Then why have you come down here?” demanded the inexorable sculptress.

“Because,” said the fairy in a fairy's whisper, “I—I just wanted to see him again. All the other men are so alike.”

“Yes; yes, I know,” said the Bonnie Lassie and threw an arm over her shoulder, and gave me a swift and wordless command to go away and be quick about it.

For the subsequent developments of the affair I expressly disclaim all responsibility. True, I was made an agent. But that was coercion, such coercion as the Bonnie Lassie practices on all of us. The scheme was hers and hers alone. If there is a weakness in the Bonnie Lassie's character, it is overfondness for the romantic and the dramatic. She loves to set the stage and move the puppets, and be the goddess from the machine generally. Miss Ethel Bennington, cast for the leading part, accepted it all implicitly, for in the strange environment of Our Square she was uncertain and self-distrustful, and she readily fell in with the dramatist's principal theme; to wit, that she had treated the Little Red Doctor very ill, and said wounding things hard to be forgiven by a high-spirited, sensitive, and red-headed lover; that any basis of pardon and understanding would be difficult and painful to arrive at, but that if he found her in straits and needing him, then the truth would come out and she would know at once whether he still cared for her or not, a point upon which my brown-and-gold fairy had her dismal doubts, it seems. Therefore she would please buy herself a working outfit and take a job with—well—with Dead-Men's-Shoes. Just the thing! Dead-Men's-Shoes, knowing so much of the matter, would require little explanation. The labor, sorting over and classifying his residuary apparel, would be not too violent; and the Little Red Doctor passed by the door daily on his way to the top floor to visit little Fannie McKay who had the rickets. It was only a question of time when he would find the fairy there toiling in poverty. Such was the setting devised by the Bonnie Lassie to bring those two together. For the rest, let Fate take its course.

Fate did. For their own private reasons, or perhaps in sheer derision of the human dramatist's puny efforts, the High Gods of Drama took a hand in the affair. They smote the Little Red Doctor, if not exactly hip and thigh, at least, tooth and jaw; so that he was incapacitated for any sort of decent, peaceable human association. They gave him an abominable toothache. The Bonnie Lassie came across Our Square to apprise me of the fact, with dismay in her face.

“What's a toothache,” I said, “in such circumstances!”

The Bonnie Lassie looked at me scornfully. “Men have no sense,” she sighed. “Do you think I'm going to have their meeting spoiled by a wretched thing like that, after all these years? Besides, he's all swollen on one side.”

“I see. You don't wish his classic beauty impaired on this occasion.”

“Don't be disagreeable. And do be good. Go to the Little Red Doctor and tell him he must have it fixed.”

I went to the Little Red Doctor and told him that very thing. To this day I believe that my age alone saved me from a murderous assault. “Have it fixed?” howled the Little Red Doctor. “Don't you suppose I want to have it fixed? Don't be an imbecile, dominie.”

“Then come along now to Doc Selters and get it filled.”

“I don't want it filled. I want it pulled. I want to get it out and stamp on it!”

“Well, he will pull it.”

“He will not. He says it's got to be saved. He's killing the nerve—on the Spanish Inquisition principle. I'd go to the fifty cent yankers this minute if I didn't have a saw-off with Selters.”

“A what?”

“A saw-off. A professional exchange. He owes me two liver-attacks and a diffuse laryngitis; and the best he'll do,” cried the Little Red Doctor, dancing with rage and pain, “is to say that the worst of it is over. D——n his eyes!”

Plainly, the Bonnie Lassie was right. The Little Red Doctor was in no state to meet vital issues. I went over to Dead-Men's-Shoes' place, and there beheld the brown-and-gold fairy skillfully sewing trouser buttons on waistcoats. She looked tired and pathetic, and when she saw me she jumped up and ran to me.

“Oh, Mr. Dominie!” she cried. “Where is he?”

I shook my head. Somehow I hadn't the heart to obtrude as unpoetic a motif as a toothache upon that prospective romance.

“I've worked and worked and worked,” she said, with a drooping mouth, “and he doesn't come. And Miss Willard won't tell me why. I'm sure something has happened to him. Has there?”

“Why, no,” I said. “That is—er—certainly not!”

“There has!” She set her hands on my shoulders and explored my face with her sweet, anxious eyes. “Tell me. You must tell me! It was you who brought me here.” (Oh, the justice of womankind!) “Was it, indeed!”

“Well, it is your fault that—that I came. You encouraged me.” She let her hands drop and her eyes darkened with reproach. “Won't you tell me if he is ill?”

“He isn't ill. On honor.”

Despite her workaday garb, she was instantly metamorphosed into the brown-and-gold fairy again. “Then, when is he coming?”

“I don't know.”

“You do! But you won't tell. You're playing with me, you and Miss Willard.”

“Didn't you play with the Little Red Doctor? What about that clandestine message in the toe of the shoe?”

“Oh!” She had the grace to blush (and a brown-and-gold fairy's blush is something to cherish in memory). But at once curiosity overbore shame. “Did you give him the shoes yourself? What did he say when he put them on?” Recalling the impassioned monosyllable which signalized the Little Red Doctor's original discovery of the hairpin, I replied truthfully enough: “I don't think that would interest you.”

“Don't you? Then how did he look?”

“Severe.”

“I know! Oh, how well I know!” Her voice declined to a caressing murmur. “And all the time there's that twinkle of fun and sympathy underneath the frown. Oh, ever so deep underneath! It took me a long time to find it.”

“And longer to forget it?” I suggested with malice.

“I don't want to forget it,” retorted the fairy loftily. “I could if I chose. You're sure there isn't anything the matter with him?”

“I never said there wasn't anything the matter with him. I said he wasn't ill.”

“Oh, well, I think it's very mean of you. You may go and sit on that pile of coats—the unpressed ones—and watch me work my poor fingers to the bone sewing on buttons until your hard heart softens and you come to a properer frame of mind.”

Accordingly I sat down and contemplated, not without a certain grim satisfaction, the spectacle of a brown-and-gold fairy sentenced to honest labor. Shadows deepened in the room until she was almost in darkness. If the necessity of labor weighed upon her blithe spirit, she gave no evidence of it, for presently she began to hum to herself in a soft, crooning undertone, “speech half-asleep or song half-awake.” Clearer and clearer grew the melody, waxing to full awakeness, as the fresh and lovely young voice filled the room with the verse, one single line of which had dragged the Little Red Doctor's heart back across the unforgetting years:—

The girlish voice trembled and stopped. The singer's hands fell into her lap. Her eyes dreamed. I think she must have forgotten, in the spell of music that she wove, the presence of an old man in the darkening room. I heard a soft, weary little catch of the breath, and then a name pronounced low and beseechingly, “Chris.” Now, this drama, as laid out by that romantic manageress the Bonnie Lassie, did not include music. The fairy song, I strongly suspect, was the interposition of the Higher Gods of Destiny. For the spell of it evolved and made real the past, and out of the past stepped the Little Red Doctor and stood trembling in the doorway of the ol'-clo' repository.

“Who sang?” he gasped.

I sat motionless. Neither the Bonnie Lassie nor the Higher Fates had assigned me a speaking part in the crisis.

“Whose voice was that?” said the Little Red Doctor fearfully. “Am I hearing sounds that don't exist?”

Out of the deepest of the shadows came the voice, broken, and thrilling.

“Chris! Oh, Chris, is it really you?”

“Ethel!” said the Little Red Doctor in a breathless cry.

He stumbled halfway across the dim room, encountered a chair, and stopped. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. His voice had hardened suddenly to that of a cross-examiner.

All the appealing and dramatic fiction which the Bonnie Lassie had carefully instilled into her subject for this crisis—the once rich and careless butterfly girl now brought low in the world and working for her precarious living—went by the board. “I—I-d-d-d-don't know,” stammered the brown-and-gold fairy.

“You—don't—know,” he repeated. Then, vehemently; “You must know.” Silence from the dim corner.

“Have you come back here to make my life wretched with longing again?”

“No. Oh, no!”

“Well? Why, then?”

“Don't be cruel to me, Chris,” pleaded the voice, a very wee, piteous voice now. Brown-and-gold fairies should not be bullied by little, red, fierce men with the toothache. They are not accustomed to it and they don't know how to defend themselves. Up to this moment my one purpose had been to tiptoe unobtrusively to the door and escape. Now I wondered whether I ought not to stay and offer aid to the abused fairy. At the next word from the Little Red Doctor, however, I gave up that notion, and resumed my cautious retreat.

“I? Cruel—to you?” he said desolately. Then, after a long pause: “I can't see you. I'm glad I can't see you. If you could know how many times I've seen you since—since I went away.”

“Seen me? Where?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. Night after weary night. For a year. Or perhaps it was two years. Only, then you weren't real. You didn't sing.”

“Ah!” The exclamation hardly stirred the air. But I knew, as well as if I had seen it, that the woman's eyes of the brown-and-gold fairy were yearning to him and that her hands were pressed over her woman's heart, which yearned to him, too.

“No. You never sang to me. You spoke. You said the same thing over and over again. You said, 'I don't love you and I never did love you and I never could love you.'”

There was a stifled cry from the darkness, and a rustle and the sound of swift, light feet. Two dim figures met and merged in one. The fairy voice, with a desperate effort to be still a voice and not quite a sob of mingled pity and joy, murmured brokenly: “I—I d-d-don't love you. But I c-c-can't live away from you.” And I passed out, on tiptoe, unnoted. The tiptoe feature was, I dare say, superfluous. I suppose I might have marched out to the blare of a brass band and with a salvo of artillery, and still have been as a formless, soundless wraith to the Little Red Doctor who stood holding all heaven and earth in his arms.

Quarter of an hour afterward I sat on the front steps of the house of Dead-Men's-Shoes musing. The Little Red Doctor and the brown-and-gold fairy came out together. They were conversing in demure tones and with a commonplace air about the prospects of rain. So wholly at ease and natural did they seem that I began to have misgivings. It didn't seem in human nature that they should be calmly discussing the weather. Could I have fallen asleep on my heap of mortuary clothing and dreamed all that happiness of theirs? I rose and intercepted them.

“How is the toothache?” I asked the Little Red Doctor.

The Little Red Doctor turned on me a face transfigured. “What toothache?” he said vaguely.

Then I knew that my dream was reality.

THE END