“Oh, Mr. William, you make my heart ache! Why do you talk so? You are not going to die! You are young and healthy! You will come back all right!” said Annie, with her eyes swimming in tears.
“Annie,” he said, forcing a smile, “there are other changes besides death, you know.”
“That is true,” she murmured. “You might come into a fortune, or you might get married, or you might do both. But you will write and tell me?”
“Oh, yes, I will write and tell you; but I want you to know now that after I am gone you are to use this room and furniture as your own to the end of the month, and then, if I do not return, take possession of the furniture,” concluded Harcourt, feeling a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that, whatever should happen to him in the near future, this good woman and sympathetic friend would never know the tragedy of his life—would never recognize in William Harcourt, the convict, William Williams, the young workman.
“If anything prevents your coming back, Mr. William, I hope it will be a wife and a fortune,” said Annie as she left the room.
Harcourt locked his valise, took a last look around his apartment, and followed her.
When he re-entered Annie’s room he found Owlet dressed for her journey.
Poor Annie had invested another dollar of her scanty savings for the child’s benefit.
She knew that it would not be proper to start the child on a railway journey with a gentleman—and Annie had never been misled into any mistake as to “Mr. William’s” real social position—in a pink calico frock and a white apron, and so she extinguished Owlet’s fiery plumage under a little brown coat, more suitable to a little bird of wisdom, and for which she had paid sixty cents at that convenient corner store for which she worked. She put a brown ribbon of the same shade of the coat on the little straw hat, in place of the blue band, put a pair of ten-cent brown gloves on the tiny hands, and a five-cent handkerchief in the little pocket, with—which was an injudicious put—a penny roll of peppermint lozenges. Last of all, she folded up a paper of sandwiches for luncheon, and gave them to Owlet, charging her to hand them over to Mr. William when they should have taken their seats in the car.
“And now you are all equipped for your travels, little mite, and may the Lord have you in his care,” said Annie, just as Harcourt entered the room, valise in hand.