The "Black Sheep" read the sympathy in her eyes.
"It's good of you to listen. You see, I've been away twenty years. It's a long time."
He sat silent for a moment staring straight before him, but seeing something that she could not see. Then he came back to her.
"Yes; it's a long time. One imagines the things one has left stand still, but they don't. I thought I'd find everything pretty much the same. Of course I might have known better, but—well, a fellow's memory and imagination play tricks upon his intelligence sometimes. I liked New York, you know. It's the only place, but I made the mistake of thinking I could fill it, and it was bigger than I had supposed. I swelled as much as I could, but I finally burst, like the ambitious frog in the fable. I'd made a good many different kinds of a fool of myself, Miss Carewe."
He hesitated, but her eyes encouraged him.
"I'd made an awful mess of things, and the family were down on me—right they were, too. The girls were pretty bitter. It was hard on them, you see, and I deserved all I got. Emmy would have forgiven me, but Lou was just rather than merciful. You know justice is Lou's long suit. Well, I cut away to Australia, and I didn't write—first because I hadn't anything good to tell, and then because I didn't believe anybody'd care to hear, and finally because it had got to be habit. It'd a' been different if mother had been alive. Probably I'd never have run—or if I had run I'd have written, but sisters—sisters are different. Mothers are——"
His voice stuck fast with a queer quaver, and Belinda nodded again. She knew that mothers were——
He found his voice.
"I struck it rich after a while and I was too busy making money to think much; but by-and-by, after the pile was pretty big, I got to thinking of ways of spending it, and then old New York began bobbing into my world again, and I thought about the girls and the things I could do to make up, and about the good times I could give some of the old crowd who had stood by me when I was good for nothing and didn't deserve a friend. And then I began planning and planning—but I didn't write. I used to go to sleep planning how I'd drop back into this little village and what I'd do to it. Finally I decided to get here for Christmas. The schoolgirls would be away then and I would walk in here and pick Emmy and Lou up, and give them the time of their lives during the holidays. All the way across the Pacific and the continent I was planning the surprise. I've got two ten-thousand-dollar checks made out to the girls here in my pocket, and I've got a list a mile long of other Christmas presents I was going to get for them. I even had the Christmas dinner menu fixed—and here I am."
He looked uncommonly like a disappointed child. Belinda found herself desperately sorry and figuratively feeling in her pocket for sugar-plums.