“Of course you didn’t,” he replied cheerfully. “But, you see, this is how it was: the moon got up, and as I had been too busy all day to see after them, it occurred to me that I might as well take a stroll down the river and look at my traps. And I’m very glad I did, Kitty. I’ll never spoil a good mind again, for fear of what I might lose by it.”
I sat down contentedly on my stump, and watched him tilting up a wooden candle-box with some sticks and a mutton bone and a piece of string, and arranging the primitive apparatus safely on a platform he had prepared for it; the while he threatened his dog, who stood over him, with the direst penalties if he ventured to interfere. And when I saw that he had quite done, I got up and turned to ascend the bank again.
“Stay a few minutes, Kitty,” he called out hastily. “Now you are here you may as well take breath before you start all that way home.”
I scouted the idea of being tired and wanting rest; but, while I hesitated, he held out his hand, and I turned back again and allowed him to reseat me on my stump. What would mother have thought? But I could not help it.
“We’ll give ourselves five minutes,” he said, turning the face of his watch to the moonlight. “It’s just a quarter to nine, and we’ll start at the ten minutes. Come here, you good-for-nothing brute! Didn’t I tell you to leave that alone?” This was addressed to his dog. “Now then, Kitty, what’s the news? I haven’t seen you for more than a week, you know.”
He stretched himself on the bank beside me, and took off his hat to the cool breeze. Did he know, I wonder, how he looked, with the moonlight on his wide brows and his strong, straight nose, and his close-cropped shapely brown head? Not he. But I did; and I wondered if I should ever see his like again, in England or any other land.
“Oh, Tom, news!” I cried out piteously. “There is dreadful news! Father has really made up his mind at last to go home.”
“The dickens he has!” responded Tom under his breath, suddenly raising himself on his elbow, and looking at me. “But I thought that was what you had been wishing for, Kitty, these years and years?”
“So I did—so I do,” said I; “but now it seems so near, somehow I feel it will be a great wrench.”
“It will be an awful wrench to those you will leave behind,” said Tom; “I know that well enough. How soon will you go, do you think?”