Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/299

 But Pittsey did not look on the proposal with any favour. "I don't exactly relish being keeper to a remittance man myself," he objected. "Why can't they send him the money, if they want him to have it?"

"Well, for one thing, he'd not keep enough of it to pay his rent here."

"That's so," Pittsey reflected. "But I'd have to fix it up some way so that he won't turn sour on me, too."

"Fix it any way you please," Don said. "I can't do anything with him, and if we don't take the money for him, we'll either have to pay for him ourselves or turn him out on the street."

Don wrote his uncle and explained the situation; and Mr. McLean, in his reply, accepted the inevitable. "He must not return," he wrote. "I will not have his mother worried. I will send enough for his support. Perhaps if we let him go his own gait he will come out all right. Keep him out of trouble. If anything goes wrong, write me."

Don accepted these instructions as releasing him from all but the most casual supervision, and he returned eagerly to his books. From reading of how to write plays, he had begun to read plays themselves; and he haunted old book shops for the second-hand volumes of "plays for amateurs and professionals," and carried them about in his pockets and studied them on the benches of the public squares or under the falling leaves of Central Park. The only dramas which he could see performed were at the few theatres that gave matinées on other days than Wednesdays and Saturdays; for on those latter afternoons he was on the stage himself. But he found an extravaganza