Come, Mr. Queed, be honest. You are supposed to have the scientist's
passion for veracity. You mercilessly demand the truth from others. Now
take some of your own medicine. Stand out like a man. Have you or have
you not missed this girl since she stopped coming?
"Yes," said the little Doctor, rather hollowly, "I ... have missed you."
Fifi's smile became simply brazen. "Do you know what, Mr. Queed? You
like me _lots_ more than you will say you do."
The young man averted his eyes. But for some time there had been in his
mind the subtle consciousness of something left undone, an occasion
which he had failed to meet with the final word of justice. Since he had
been in the room, a vague, unwelcome resolve had been forming in his
mind, and at Fifi's bold words, it hardened into final shape. He drew a
deep breath.
"You referred to me as your friend once, F--Fifi. And I said that I was
not."
"I know."
"I was--mistaken"--so he drained his medicine to the dregs. "I ... am
your friend."
Now the child's smile was the eternal motherly. "Lor', Mr. Queed, I knew
it all the time."
Queed looked at the floor. The sight of Fifi affected him most curiously
to-day. He felt strangely ill at ease with her, only the more so because
she was so amazingly at home with him. She wore her reddish-brown hair
not rounded up in front as of old, but parted smoothly in the middle,
and this only emphasized the almost saintly purity of her wasted little
face. Her buoyant serenity puzzled and disconcerted him.
Meantime Fifi was examining Queed carefully. "You've been doing
something to yourself, Mr. Queed! What is it? Why, you look ten times
better than even four weeks ago!"
"I think," he said drearily, "it must be Klinker's Exercises. I give
them," broke from him, "_one hour and twenty minutes a day!_"
But he pulled himself together, conscientiously determined to take the
cheery view with Fifi.
"It is an extraordinary thing, but I am feeling better, physically and
mentally, than I ever felt before, and this though I never had a really
sick day in my life. It must be the exercises, for that is the only
change I have made in my habits. Yet I never supposed that exercise had
any such practical value as that. However," he went on slowly, "I am
beginning to believe that there are several things in this world that I
do not understand."
Here, indeed, was a most humiliating, an epoch-making, confession to
come from the little Doctor. It was accompanied with a vague smile,
intended to be cheering and just the thing for a sick-room. But the
dominant note in this smile was bewildered and depressed helplessness,
and at it the maternal instinct sprang full-grown in Fifi's thin little
bosom. A passionate wish to mother the little Doctor tugged at her
heart.
"You know what you need, Mr. Queed? Friends--lots of good friends--"