ENSON raised himself on his B elbow in the bed, and stared at the doorway.
“Hello, Cupid!” he said. “Where are your clothes?”
The youngster grinned, and wiped away a little stream of water that was trickling down from his sopping head.
“I'm hidin',” he said coolly. “I jumped out of the bath-tub and runned away; an' now I'm hidin'.”
“You need to be hiding,” Benson said severely. “What do you mean, running around without a stitch on your back?”
But Cupid was looking anxiously up the long hotel hall; then, with a squeal, he scrambled into Benson's bed and snuggled up against him.
“She's comin',” he whispered excitedly from under the sheet drawn taut over his head. “I'm a hippotamus, and I've runned away out of my circus-tank!”
Benson looked at the moist spot on the sheet where it covered the youngster's curls. He was conscious, too, of a sensation of dampness where the wet little body touched him. Billy wriggled down under the covers and lay still.
“You'll suffocate and die,” remonstrated Benson. “I've a good notion to kick you out of there!”
“Can't,” came a smothered tone from near the foot of the bed. “You can't; you only got one foot.”
“Indeed?” queried Benson with polite interest. “And where's the other?”
“In the grave,” said Billy sepulchrally from his place of retirement.
Benson chuckled.
“So, that's what they said, eh? Well—”
“Billy! Billy!” some one was calling softly out in the hall.
Billy squirmed, but did not answer. The door stood open, and presently a girl appeared—a very enchanting vision of a girl, with her sleeves tucked up and a big apron almost covering her.
“Billy!” she called again, and glanced through the open door to where Benson sat propped up in bed, with a half-dozen pillows behind him.
“I was looking for Billy,” she said, turning a bright pink. “He got out of the tub and ran while I was getting a towel.” Her eyes suddenly rested on the damp place where Billy's head had been, and went from there, slowly and surely, to the suspicious heap at the foot of the bed. “I—thought he might have run in here.”
“I don't see him,” said Benson, glancing carelessly at the corners of the room.
“Small boys who run away when their aunties are trying to bathe them,” Miss Lecky said firmly, “never have any ice-cream sodas when they go for walks.”
“Certainly ,” said Benson; “nor sailor suits with long trousers on Sundays. I quite agree with you.”
The covers at the foot of the bed were convulsed; there was a struggle, followed by a loud sneeze, and Billy's flushed face appeared.
“Nor not any ride this evening with you and Dicky?”
Billy was very anxious. Benson watched Miss Lecky's face.
“I should think,” he said judicially, “that giving up the ice-cream soda would be enough punishment for to-day. What does auntie think? Dicky's so keen about taking him, too.”
Miss Lecky leaned over, and swathing Billy in a huge towel drew him from his lair.
“Hold it on and run,” she said, and Billy ran with all the energy of his short legs down the hall. “Then she looked at Benson. 'You are certainly recovering,” she said as she moved away. “That remark was quite like your old self!”
“Don't go,” he pleaded. “Stay and scold me, won't you? I'd rather be scolded by you than be made love to by Mrs.”
But she had gone. Benson waited for a moment, hoping she would come back; then he kicked a magazine off the bed and settled his pillows with a vicious punch.
“It's worse than imposition,” Mrs. Anstruther had said one day to a gathering of three in the convalescent's room. “There's the child's mother in town all morning, sleeping and primping all afternoon, and flirting all evening. No one can tell me that Colonel Agnew wasn't holding Mrs. Ware's hand the other night—the night he carried her coffee out on the veranda, Anne.”
“And all the time Rebecca Lecky looking after the boy,” said Miss Smythe, feeling in her stocking-bag for the darning-silk. “Do you know, Dicky has been trying for a month to take her for a drive alone. I must say, he is very much impressed with her, and she's a good, sweet girl; and, of course, he has to marry some time; and every time that selfish sister of hers runs off somewhere, and Rebecca has to take the boy.”
Benson very seldom took any active part in the conversation; it pleased him to lie back in his chair and listen. But now he ventured a remark.
“It's pretty decent of Miss Lecky,” he said.
“She's soft,” Mrs. Anstruther sniffed—“that's the only word for it—soft.”