Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/245

 he stood and convince himself that he was not mistaken. He had sulked—and been ignored. He had boasted, and his self-assertion had been accepted in a silence that defeated him. He could not take his mother to the Babbing Bureau to convince her that he had not greatly exaggerated his importance there. And certainly there was no way in which he could bring the Babbing Bureau to her. If the hero of “The Boy Pirate” had come home to be spanked for playing hookey and telling lies to excuse his truancy, the situation might have had a parallel in Barney’s mind. Nothing less bathetic could equal it.

His mother kept a furnished lodging-house in Hudson Street, and he came up the worn sandstone steps to her blistered colonial door, with as little alacrity as if he were still a telegraph boy delivering a message. His sister Annie answered bis ring. “Oh, it ’s you,” she said; and he thought she said it disparagingly. He did not reply to her. He went down the shabby hall to the back stairs and descended