“That was it, Dandy,” said Ran.
“Same time, if, as how I had thought it might be so, myself would have gone to the rectory with him. And ’deed I’d agone, anyhow, only I didn’t like to be intruding into a strange place.”
“I can’t understand,” said Will Walling, speaking for the first time, “how you fortune-seekers can bear to stay away for years from your native country without hearing a word from any of your friends at home, and then, when you make up your mind to return, and once set foot in your native land, you straightway get into a fever of anxiety and impatience to meet them.”
“No more do I, but so it is!” confessed Dandy.
“Yis,” added Mike. “Sure it was the very same wid Mister Longman himself when he was gitting nigh onto the ould farrum where he left his mother. It is curious.”
“You see, if I only knowed she were alive and well,” said Dandy apologetically.
“Oh, you may be sure of that,” cheerfully exclaimed Ran, “but I don’t think she is at the rectory.”
“Why don’t you then, sir?” inquired Dandy.
“Because if she had been Longman would have seen her and told her about you, and she would certainly have run over last night or early this morning to see you.”
“So she would! So she would! And yet I dunno—I dunno! Even darters in these days ain’t none too dutiful to feythers, let alone nieces to uncles, ’specially when they’ve been parted twenty years,” said Dandy, shaking his bald head.