That was one great difference between her and Dr. Redfield. He
did not say he would see; if given half a chance he always _did_
see, and there was something so magical about him that one felt
he was good for a miracle most any time. For all that, it was
hard to ask him for anything, for when in his presence one always
felt so queer and bashful and overpowered with the strange
medicine smells which were such a big part of him. Yet David now
felt that no boy has any right to hope for a father if he hasn't
spirit enough to ask for one. So firmly convinced of this was the
little boy that early in the morning he made up his mind as to
what he would do. It was something very daring and very naughty.
He was going to run away.

He did it, too, and the awfulness of it got into his throat; for
the Doctor lives farther away from David's house than China is.
It is almost at the end of things, and the little boy did not
know whether he could find it. What was even worse, he presently
did not know whether he could get back home again. He had crept
through the fence and run and run, and then walked and walked,
and now he had decided that he didn't care much about going on.
Some other time would do as well; to-morrow would be all right.
This did not feel like a lucky day; some other day would be
luckier.

David felt very virtuous. It seemed to him that he had not meant
to run away at all. He was not a bad little boy; he was a good
little boy, but he soon began to feel annoyed; for the way home
didn't have any straightness to it; the way home began to get
more and more crooked, and the houses began to seem strange and
unfriendly; they stared at him rudely, and none of them looked
either like home or like the Doctor's house.

The sad thing was that he had only one way to tell which was the
Doctor's house, and that was a wrong way. He was looking for a
yellow dog that scratched his head with his toenails and knocked
his elbow on the board-walk when he did it. Such a dog once lay
in front of the Doctor's house. So now, as David kept going and
going on, he was looking out for a yellow dog that should knock
with his elbow when he scratched his head with his toenails. Once
a black dog did it, but that was stupid of him; he needn't try to
fool David.

After a long, long while a great tiredness came upon the little
boy, and there was such a grinding ache in him that he knew
hungry-time had come. He passed a bakeshop that breathed out a