air, she moved six inches more and I seen the calf of a leg and
part of a crumpled-up coat tail.

"But I AM going with you, Henry," says Jane. And she gets up jest like
she is going to put her arms around him.

But Jane don't. Fur that chair swings clear around and there sets the
perfessor. He's all hunched up and caved in and he's rubbing his eyes
like he's jest woke up recent, and he's got a grin onto his face that
makes him look like his sister Estelle looks all the time.

"Excuse me," says the perfessor.

They both swings around and faces him. I can hear my heart bumping. Jane
never says a word. The man with the brown beard never says a word. But
if they felt like me they both felt like laying right down there and
having a fit. They looks at him and he jest sets there and grins at
them.

But after a while Jane, she says:

"Well, now you KNOW! What are you going to do about it?"

Henry, he starts to say something too. But--

"Don't start anything," says the perfessor to him. "YOU aren't going to
do anything." Or they was words to that effect.

"Professor Booth," he says, seeing he has got to say something or else
Jane will think the worse of him, "I am--"

"Keep still," says the perfessor, real quiet. "I'll tend to you in a
minute or two. YOU don't count for much. This thing is mostly between me
and my wife."

When he talks so decided I thinks mebby that perfessor has got something
into him besides science after all. Jane, she looks kind o' surprised
herself. But she says nothing, except:

"What are you going to do, Frederick?" And she laughs one of them mean
kind of laughs, and looks at Henry like she wanted him to spunk up a
little more, and says: "What CAN you do, Frederick?"

Frederick, he says, not excited a bit:

"There's quite a number of things I COULD do that would look bad when
they got into the newspapers. But it's none of them, unless one of you
forces me to it." Then he says:

"You DID want to see the children, Jane?"

She nodded.

"Jane," he says, "can't you see I'm the better man?"

The perfessor, he was woke up after all them years of scientifics, and
he didn't want to see her go. "Look at him," he says, pointing to the
feller with the brown beard, "he's scared stiff right now."

Which I would of been scared myself if I'd a-been ketched that-a-way
like Henry was, and the perfessor's voice sounding like you was chopping
ice every time he spoke. I seen the perfessor didn't want t