wanted to thank Mr Matthews, and if Mr Matthews liked a visit from the doctor she was glad he should have it. The person who was most proud of Harriet looking so much better was Alec. He felt as though it was he who was making her well, for after all it was his two shillings which paid for the skates, and so when it was wet and cold while he was on his paper round he did not mind as much as he might have done.
“It’d be much worse the weather being awful,” he told Toby, “If Harriet wasn’t getting any better, I should feel then it was all for nothing.”
Toby peered at Alec through his spectacles.
“Mathematically speaking, if Harriet was not getting well, that fact would be cancelled out by the two shillings weekly towards vegetables for the spring.”
Alec told Toby to shut up with his mathematical nonsense, but all the same he agreed with him about the two shillings a week. Two shillings a week adds up quickly when it is put in a money-box. Besides, to Alec it was more than two shillings a week, it was adventure, the capital that was to start him out on a magnificent career. On scraps of paper in his pockets, in his bedroom and in his desk at school were plans of how he intended his father’s shop to look. There were arrows pointing to piles of fruit and vegetables. Each plan covered a different season of the year, and each was so ambitious that had he been able to buy all the things for his plan his father’s shop would have looked like an exhibition of fruit and vegetables at a flower show. His vision of what he would buy in the spring was helped by Mr Pulton, who sometimes said to him when he paid him on Saturdays:
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