Despite her intolerance of jokes at his expense Mrs. Platt thought his commiseration very funny, but she had her own reasons to feel deeply the lad's simple effort at courtesy and proffer of kind offices. Her heart was the more tender in the knowledge that she had not long to live. A persistent bronchial affection, with which she had warred for years, which had kept them poor, devouring money and care and time like some veritable monster, had, still unappeased, developed into consumption, now so unmistakable that even Bob Platt's laugh was often petrified on his jovial face by the perception of the fierce and ghastly fate that stood awaiting his household in the near future. She accepted Ned's politeness in the spirit in which it had been offered, and sometimes made him proud and pleased in executing some trifling commission. He came at last to be more genuinely useful, and often was intrusted with the escort of the four small girls of the family to the Sunday-school; and by this means Mrs. Platt got in some missionary work, for at that Sunday-school Ned heard of many comfortable things his spirit had not known before. The four Platt girls had also some secular pleasures in which he participated, and the chief of these was called by them "viewin' the percession!" Never was there a muster of militia or a parade of firemen or a wonderful exhibition of bicyclists through the streets that they were not present to see. Whenever the exaction of the payment of some grotesque election bet set the community agog over the spectacle of one commercial magnate propelling another in a wheelbarrow through the principal thoroughfares, preceded by a band of music, and with all the teeth of the town a-grin in evidence of relish, the keenest cackle of callow laughter came from the four Platts and their attendant printer's devil. Never a circus tent was pitched and the elephant made the tour of the town that Ned, with each hand held tight by the smaller girls while the two elder followed close behind within clutch of his protective jacket, did not hie himself with his charges to some coigne of vantage particularly adapted to joyously see all that there was to be seen. It was always Mrs. Platt who thanked the boy, but it was Bob who owed him special gratitude on these occasions, for but for this substitute he must needs have played squire of dames himself, for the Platt girls would take no denial, and their father had long ago lost a living interest in elephants. Nowadays, however, Ned was aware that it was Bob Platt himself who took special note of him whenever he chanced to appear at the house, far more rarely though it was than heretofore; for the boy was both proud and sensitive, and he feared lest some allusion to his arrest and that terrible day behind the bars escape these friends of happier times. "I want to set Ned to talking," Platt would urge when his wife would object to his interference with the lad.