Dot up-town page is gettin' first-rate. He says he don' know vhat
he'd have done if he hadn't turned up here dot day."

Tembarom, having "caught on" to his fault of style, applied himself
with vigor to elimination. He kept his tame dictionary chained to the
leg of his table--an old kitchen table which Mrs. Bowse scrubbed and
put into his hall bedroom, overcrowding it greatly. He turned to
Little Ann at moments of desperate uncertainty, but he was man enough
to do his work himself. In glorious moments when he was rather sure
that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had
looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober
alluringness,-- it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his
blood,--he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a
minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD "get away with it" to
the extent of making enough to--but he always pulled himself up in
time.

"Nice fool I look, thinking that way!" he would say to himself.
"She'd throw me down hard if she knew. But, my Lord! ain't she just a
peach!"

It was in the last week of the month of trial which was to decide the
permanency of the page that he came upon the man Mrs. Bowse's
boarders called his "Freak." He never called him a "freak" himself
even at the first. Even his somewhat undeveloped mind felt itself
confronted at the outset with something too abnormal and serious,
something with a suggestion of the weird and tragic in it.

In this wise it came about: