e may as well be on our
way. He's nearly asleep now."

Burns stood up, throwing off his coat. But Ellen remonstrated.

"Dear, you are so tired to-night. Let me call Jim over to help you carry
him up."

A derisive laugh answered her. "Great Caesar, Len! The chap's a mere bag
of bones--and if he were twice as heavy he'd be no weight for me. Jim
Macauley would howl at the idea, and no wonder. Go ahead and open the
doors, please, and I'll have him up in a jiffy."

He stooped over the couch, swung the slender figure up into his powerful
arms, speaking reassuringly to the eyes which slowly opened in
half-stupefied alarm. "It's all right, little Hungary. We're going to
put you to bed, like the small lost boy you are. Bring his fiddle,
Len--he won't want that out of his sight."

He strode away with his burden, and marched up the stairs as if he were
carrying his own two-year-old son. Arrived in the small, comfortable
little room at the back of the house he laid his charge on the bed, and
stood looking down at him.

"Len, I'll have to go the whole figure," he said--and said it not as if
the task he was about to impose upon himself were one that irked him.
"Get me hot water and soap and towels, will you? And an old pair of
pajamas. I can't put him to bed in his rags."

"Shall I send for Amy?" questioned his wife, quite as if she understood
the uselessness of remonstrance.

"Not much. Amy's making out bills for me to-night, we'll not interrupt
the good work. Put some bath-ammonia in the water, please--and have it
hot."

Half an hour later he called her in to see the work of his hands. She
had brought him one of his surgical aprons with the bath equipment. With
his sleeves rolled up, his apron well splashed, his coppery hair more or
less in disarray from the occasional thrustings of a soapy hand, and his
face flushed and eager like a healthy boy's, Red Pepper Burns stood
grinning down at his patient. Little Hungary lay in the clean white bed,
his pale face shining with soap and happiness, his arms upon the
coverlet encased in the blue and white sleeves of Burns's pajamas, the
sleeves neatly turned back to accommodate the shortness of his arms. The
workman turned to Ellen as she came in.

"Comfy, eh?" he observed briefly.

"Absolutely, I should say, poor dear."

"Ah, you wouldn't have called him that before the bath. But he is rather
a dear now, isn't he? And I think he's younger than I did downstairs.
Not over eight