true, sir.”
“We must work! I must say this child is a bit discouraging at times. I should have thought a deaf-mute would have learned his part by now.”
I will say this for the kid, though: he was a trier. Failure didn’t damp him. Whenever there was any kind of sweet in sight he had a dash at his line, and kept saying something till he had got what he was after.
His chief fault was his uncertainty. Personally, I would have been prepared to risk opening in the act and was ready to start the public performance at the first opportunity, but Jeeves said no.
“I would not advocate undue haste, sir,” he said. “As long as the young gentleman’s memory refuses to act with any certainty, we are running grave risks of failure. Today, if you recollect, sir, he said ‘Kick Freddie!’ That is not a speech to win a young lady’s heart, sir.”
“No. And she might do it, too. You’re right. We must postpone production.”
But, by Jove, we didn’t! The curtain went up the very next afternoon.
It was nobody’s fault—certainly not mine. It was just fate. Jeeves was out, and I was alone in the house with Freddie and the child. Freddie had just settled down at the piano, and I was leading the kid out of the place for a bit of exercise, when, just as we’d got on to the veranda, along came the girl Elizabeth on her way