Judy swept down the stairs like a silent whirlwind, turned key, drew bolts, and in a moment she and the cur were “sobbing in each other’s arms.”
She carried him up to her room, washed his dear, muddy paws, and spread her golf cape that he might lie on the bed beside her.
In chilliest, earliest dawn she rose and dressed. She found a wire that had supported her pictures at the bazaar, and she wrote a note and tied it to the collar of Alcibiades, where she noticed and untied a frayed end of rope. This was the note:
“He has run home to me. Why did you take the chain off? He always bites through cord. Don’t beat him for it; he’ll soon forget me.”
The tears came into her eyes as she wrote it; it seemed to her so very pathetic. She did not quite believe that Alcibiades would soon forget her—but if he did——?
The note did not lack pathos, either, in the eyes of Captain Graeme, when, two hours later, he found it under the chin of a mournfully howling Alcibiades, securely attached by picture wire to the railings of his mother’s house.
The Captain took a turn on the Heath, and thought. And his thoughts were these: “She’s the prettiest girl I’ve seen since I came home. It’s deuced dull here. Shouldn’t wonder if she’s dull too, poor little girl.”
Then he went home and cut a glove in pieces and sewed the pieces together, slowly but solidly as soldiers and sailors do sew. So that when, two nights later, the claws and the voice of Alcibiades roused Judy from sleep—her aunt most fortunately slept on the other side of the house—she found, after the first rapturous hug of reunion, a something under the hand that caressed the neck of Alcibiades.
The gaslight in her own room defined the something as a bag of leather, the tan leather of which gentlemen’s gloves are made. There was a bit of worn strap hanging below it. Within was a note.
“A thousand thanks for bringing him home. If he should run away again, please let me know. And don’t trouble to send him back. I’ll call for him, if I may.