setting there with his face in his hands, staring, and his lips moving
now and then like he was talking to himself.

The next day he is asleep all morning. But that day he don't drink
any more, and Looey says mebby it ain't going to be one of the reg'lar
pifflicated kind. I seen Martha agin that day, too--twicet I has talks
with her. I told her about the doctor.

"Is he into a quest, do you think?" I asts her.

She says she thinks it is remorse fur some crime he has done. But I
couldn't figger Doctor Kirby would of done none. So that night after the
show I says to him, innocent-like:

"Doctor Kirby, what is a quest?" He looks at me kind of queer.

"Wherefore," says he, "this sudden thirst for enlightenment?"

"I jest run acrost the word accidental-like," I told him.

He looks at me awful hard, his eyes jest natcherally digging into me.
I felt like he knowed I had set out to pump him. I wisht I hadn't tried
it. Then he tells me a quest is a hunt. And I'm glad that's over with.
But it ain't. Fur purty soon he says:

"Danny, did you ever hear of Lady Clara Vere de Vere?"

"No," I says, "who is she?"

"A lady friend of Lord Tennyson's," he says, "whose manners were above
reproach."

"Well," I says, "she sounds kind of like a medicine to me."

"Lady Clara," he says, "and all the other Vere de Veres, were people
with manners we should try to imitate. If Lady Clara had been here last
night when I was talking to myself, Danny, her manners wouldn't have let
her listen to what I was talking about."

"I didn't listen!" I says. Fur I seen what he was driving at now with
them Vere de Veres. He thought I had ast him what a quest was because he
was on one. I was certain of that, now. He wasn't quite sure what he had
been talking about, and he wanted to see how much I had hearn. I thinks
to myself it must be a awful funny kind of hunt he is on, if he only
hunts when he is in that fix. But I acted real innocent and like my
feelings was hurt, and he believed me. Purty soon he says, cheerful
like:

"There was a girl talking to you to-day, Danny."

"Mebby they was," I says, "and mebby they wasn't." But I felt my face
getting red all the same, and was mad because it did. He grinned kind of
aggervating at me and says some poetry at me about in the spring a young
man's frenzy likely turns to thoughts of love.

"Well," I says, kind of sheepish-like, "this is summer-time, and purty
nigh autumn." Then I seen I'd jest as good a