Barney tried the door slyly. It opened. He edged in, over the threshold. “If you want to send an answer, sir,” he said, ”I can take it.”
Babbing caught him by the ”cowlick” that adorned his ingenuous young forehead. “Get out of here,” he laughed, “or I ’ll have you arrested.” And Barney, as startled as if he had been wakened from a dream, grinned confusedly. “That ’s all right,” Babbing said. “If you do it as well as that.”
“Was I all right?” Barney cried, exulting. “Was I?” He knew that he was; he could see it in Babbing’s face; but he wanted to hear it. And he spoke in the voice of a boy playing with a boy.
Babbing changed his expression. “Yes, but this ‘Nick Carter’ stuff,” he said, pointing to Barney’s coat on a hook, “you must n’t destroy your mind with that sort of thing. That must stop with your cigarettes.”
It returned Barney instantly to the hypocritical schoolroom manner of a pupil re-
