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“Cold beer!” said the parrot wickedly.

IV

The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each morning found a glow of hope–that died, it is true, by noontime; but it came again with the new day.

“How’s Polly this morning, Montmorency?” she would say, and give him a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: “I wish you could talk, Reginald. I’d like to hear what Rose said when you took the parrot. It must have been a scream!”

He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in her eyes.

“The old goat’s been pretty good to me, hasn’t he?” she said.

“I believe it is very unusual. I wonder”–the Probationer poised the comb–“perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know.”

They knew nothing, of course, of the boy John and the window.

“He’s about the first decent man I ever knew,” said the Avenue Girl–“and he’s a fool!”

“Either a fool or very, very wise,” replied the Probationer.

The interne and the Probationer were good friends again, but they had never quite got back to the place they had lost on the roof. Over the Avenue Girl’s dressing their eyes met sometimes, and there was an appeal in the man’s and tenderness; but there was pride too. He would not say he had not meant it. Any man will tell you that he was entirely right, and that she had been most unwise and needed a good scolding–only, of course, it is never the wise people who make life worth the living.

And an important thing had happened–the Probationer had been accepted and had got her cap. She looked very stately in it, though it generally had a dent somewhere from her forgetting she had it on and putting her hat on over it. The first day she wore it she knelt at prayers with the others, and said a little Thank You! for getting through when she was so unworthy. She asked to be made clean and pure, and delivered from vanity, and of some use in the world. And, trying to think of the things she had been remiss in, she went out that night in a rain and bought some seed and things for the parrot.

Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was refused politely.

“You are a part of the institution now,” said the interne, with his eyes on her cap. He was rather afraid of the cap. “I cannot cripple the institution.”

It was the Dummy who solved that question. No one knew how he knew the necessity or why he had not come forward sooner; but come he did and would not be denied. The interne went to a member of the staff about it.

“The fellow works round the house,” he explained; “but he’s taken a great fancy to the girl and I hardly know what to do.”

“My dear boy,” said the staff, “one of the greatest joys in the world is to suffer for a woman. Let him go to it.”

So the Dummy bared his old-young arm–not once, but many times. Always as the sharp razor nicked up its bit of skin he looked at the girl and smiled. In the early evening he perched the parrot on his bandaged arm and sat on the roof or by the fountain in the courtyard. When the breeze blew strong enough the water flung over the rim and made little puddles in the hollows of the cement pavement. Here belated sparrows drank or splashed their dusty feathers, and the parrot watched them crookedly.