For Mayme, Read Mary

"Where is she?" repeated the Weeping Scion.

Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid's-bow of his mouth had straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom aforetime he had stigmatized as a "white-whiskered old goat," he now addressed as "Sir."

"Perhaps you'll tell me where she is, sir," said he patiently.

"Leave it to me," said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst for the dramatic in real life. "And keep next Sunday night open."

She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at her studio, of David's "Doggy" from the "Grass and Asphalt" sketches which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as expressed to his waif of a dog. For the supporting part we borrowed Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and only rehearsal). After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the time to settle accounts, but she never could repay--and so forth and so on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might accept the thanks if not the check. Instead of which I blurted out the truth.

"Oh, Dominie!" said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank within me. "Do you think that was fair? Don't you know that I never could have taken the money?"

"Precisely. And we had to find a way to make you take it. We couldn't have you dying on the premises," I argued with a feeble attempt at jocularity.

"But from him!" she said. "After what had happened--And his mother. How could you let me do it!"

"I thought you would have gotten over that feeling by this time," I ventured.

"Oh, there's none of the old feeling left," she answered, so simply that I knew she believed her own statement. "But to have lived on his money--Where is he?" she asked abruptly.

I told her that also and about Sunday night; the whole thing. The Bonnie Lassie would have slain me. But I couldn't help it. I was feeling rather abject.

Sunday night came, and with it Miss Marie Courtenay, escorted by an "ace" covered with decorations, whose name is a household word and who was only too obviously her adoring slave. Already there had been hints of their engagement. Had I been that ace, I should have felt no small discomposure at the sight of the girl's face when she first saw the changed and matured Weeping Scion of three years before. After the first flash of recognition she had developed on that expressive face of hers a look of wonder and almost pathetic questioning, and, I thought, who knew and loved the child, already something deeper and sweeter. Young David, after greeting the star of the evening, took a modest rear seat as befitted his rank. But when the Bonnie Lassie announced "Doggy," it was his face that was the study.

Of that performance I shall say nothing. It is now famous and familiar to thousands of theater-goers. But if ever mortal man spent twenty minutes in fairyland, it was David, while Mary was playing the work of his fancy. At the close, he disappeared. I suppose he did not dare trust himself to join in the congratulations with which she was overwhelmed. I found him, as I rather expected, on the bench where he had sat when Mayme McCartney first found him. And when the crowd had departed from the studio, I told the girl. Without even stopping to put on her hat she went out to him.

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his cheekbones. But this time he was not weeping. He was thinking. Just as of old she put a hand on his humped shoulder. Startled, he looked up, and jumped to his feet. She was holding something out to him.

"What's that?" he said.

"A check. For what I owe you."

"Who told you? The Little Red Doctor promised--"

"He's kept his promise. The Dominie told me."

"Oh! I suppose," he said slowly, "I've got to take this. You wouldn't--no, of course you wouldn't," he sighed.

"I've tried to keep strict account," she said.

David adopted a matter-of-fact tone. "I can't deny that it'll come in handy, just now," he remarked. "At the present price of clothing, and with my personal exchequer in its depleted state--"

"Why," she broke in, "has anything happened? Your mother--?"

"Cut off," said David briefly.

"She's cut you off? On my account? Oh--"

"No. I've cut her off. Temporarily. She doesn't want me to work. I'm working. On a newspaper."

"That's good," said the girl warmly. "Let's sit down."

They sat down. Each, however, found it curiously hard to begin again. Mary was aching to thank him, but had a dreadful fear that if she tried to, she would cry. She didn't want to cry. She had a feeling that crying would be a highly unstrategic procedure leading to possible alarming developments. Why didn't David say something? Finally he did make a beginning.

"Mayme."

"No: not 'Mayme' any more."

He flushed to his temples. "I beg your pardon, Miss Courtenay."

"Nonsense!" she said softly. "Mary. I've discarded the 'Mayme' long ago."

"Mary," he repeated in a tone of musing content.

"Buddy."

He caught his breath. "A few thousand of the best guys in the world," he said, "call a fellow that. And every time they said it, it made my heart ache with longing to hear it in your voice."

"You're a queer Buddy," returned the girl, not quite steadily. "Did you bring me home a German helmet for a souvenir?"

He shook his head. "I didn't bring home much of anything, except some experience and the discovery of the fact that when I had to stand on my own feet, I wasn't much."

"You got your stripes, didn't you?" suggested the girl.

"That's all I did get," he returned jealously. "I didn't get any medal, or palms or decorations or crosses of war: I didn't get anything except an occasional calling down and a few scratches. If I'd had the luck to get into aviation or some of the fancy branches--" David checked himself. "There I go," he said in self-disgust. "Beefing again."

It was quite in the old, spoiled-child tone; an echo of indestructible personality, the Weeping Scion of other days; and it went straight to Mary's swelling, bewildered, groping heart. She began to laugh and a sob tangled itself in the laughter, and she choked and said:

"Buddy."

He turned toward her.

"Don't be dumb, Buddy," she said, in the words of their unforgotten first talk. "You've--you've got me--if you still want me."

She put out a tremulous hand to him, and it slipped over his shoulder and around his neck, and she was drawn close into his arms.

"The Little Red Doctor," remarked David after an interlude, in the shaken tone of one who has had undeserved miracles thrust upon him, "said that to want something more than anything in the world and not get it was good for my soul, besides serving me right."

"The Little Red Doctor," retorted Mary McCartney, with the reckless ingratitude of a woman in love, "is a dear little red idiot. What does he know about Us!"

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