“Bobby? Bobby McGinnis?” The blue eyes half closed and seemed to be looking far into the past. Suddenly they opened wide and flashed a glad recognition into his face. “And are you Bobby McGinnis?”
“Yes.”
“Why, of course I remember Bobby McGinnis,” she cried, with outstretched hand. “It was you that found me when I was a wee bit of a girl and lost in New York, though that I don’t remember. But we used to play together there in Houghtonsville, and it was you that got me the contract——” She stopped abruptly and turned her face away. The man saw her lips and chin tremble. “I can’t speak of it—even now,” she said brokenly, after a moment. Then, gently: “Tell me of yourself. How came you here?”
“I came here at once from Houghtonsville.” McGinnis’s voice, too, was not quite steady. She nodded, and he went on without explaining the “at once”—he had thought she would understand. “I went to work in the mills, and—I have been here ever since. That is all,” he said simply.
“But how happened it that you came—here?”
A dull red flushed the man’s cheeks. His eyes swerved from her level gaze, then came back suddenly with the old boyish twinkle in their depths.
“I came,” he began slowly, “well, to look after your affairs.”
“My affairs!”
“Yes. I was fifteen. I deemed somehow that I was the one remaining friend who had your best interests at heart. I couldn’t look after you, naturally—in a girls’ school—so I did the next best thing. I looked after your inheritance.”
“Dear old Bobby!” murmured the girl. And the man who heard knew, in spite of a conscious throb of joy, that it was the fifteen-year-old lad that Margaret Kendall saw before her, not the man-grown standing at her side.