Once on the pavement she looked nervously up and down the street, gathered her pretty skirts tight in her hand and with the fluttered flight of a scared bird darted across the park, dashed through her swinging gate, and so on up to her bedroom.
There she buried her face in Mammy Henny's lap and burst into an agony of tears.
While all this had been going on upstairs another equally important conference was taking place in Pawson's office below, where Harry at Pawson's request had gone to meet Gadgem and talk over certain plans for his uncle's future welfare. He had missed Kate by one of those trifling accidents which often determine the destiny of nations and of men. Had he, after attending to the business of the morning—(he had been down to Marsh Market with Todd for supplies)—mounted the steps to see his uncle instead of yielding to a sudden impulse to interview Pawson first and his uncle afterward, he would have come upon Kate at the very moment she was pouring out her heart to St. George.
But no such fatality or stroke of good fortune—whatever the gods had in store for him—took place. On the contrary he proceeded calmly to carry out the details of a matter of the utmost importance to all concerned—one in which both Pawson and Gadgem were interested—(indeed he had come at Pawson's suggestion to discuss its details with the collector and himself):—all of which the Scribe promises in all honor to reveal to his readers before the whole of this story is told.
Harry walked straight up to Gadgem:
“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Gadgem,” he said in his manly, friendly way. “You have been very good to my uncle, and I want to thank you both for him and for myself,” and he shook the little man's hand heartily.
Gadgem blushed. St. George's democracy he could understand; but why this aristocrat—outcast as he had once been, but now again in favor—why this young prince, the heir to Moorlands and the first young blood of his time, should treat him as an equal, puzzled him; and yet, somehow, his heart warmed to him as he read his sincerity in his eyes and voice.
“Thank you, sir—thank you very much, sir,” rejoined Gadgem, with a folding-camp-stool-movement, his back bent at right angles with his legs. “I really don't deserve it, sir. Mr. Temple is an EXtraordinary man, sir; the most EXtraordinary man I have ever met, sir. Give you the shirt off his back, sir, and go NAked himself.”
“Yes, he gave it to me,” laughed Harry, greatly amused at the collector's effusive manner: He had never seen this side of Gadgem. “That, of course, you know all about—you paid the bills, I believe.”
“PREcisely so, sir.” He had lengthened out now with a spiral-spring, cork-screw twist in his body, his index finger serving as point. “Paid every one of them. He never cared, sir—he GLOried in it—GLOried in being a pauper. UNaccountable, Mr. Rutter—Enormously unaccountable. Never heard of such a case; never WILL hear of such a case. So what was to be done, sir? Just what I may state is being done this minute over our heads UPstairs”: and out went the index finger. “Rest and REcuperation, sir—a slow—a very slow use of AVAILable assets until new and FURther AVAILable assets could become visible. And they are here, sir—have arRIVED. You may have heard, of course, of the Patapsco where Mr. Temple kept the largest part of his fortune.”