And then the beautiful bright face of his beloved looking so searchingly at him as if she knew what he had just felt, and the knowledge of all that he possessed in her made his heart leap and his eyes fill. Mr. Stewart queried kindly, “Have ye disposed of our friend satisfactorily—handed him over to his folks?”
“Yes,” replied C. B. “His wife and son and daughter came for him, and as they said they could look after him all right and he was still half unconscious I stepped aside and let them drive away with him. I didn’t realize until they were gone how dependent I have been on him in another way. And then I remembered you and Mary here and I was full of gladness, because apart from our love I should have been very lonely in this big town. And I have no money. I am beginning to see that out in the world one must have money, and that it cannot be despised as I thought.”
Mary’s face glowed as she caught at C. B.’s arm and cried—
“Ah, you dear unselfish love, I am so glad that you will never need to know the value of money or worry about it. It is a good thing in its place, and I’m never going to run it down, for my dear daddy has taken care that I never needed any, only I do know so many people who are eaten up with the love of it, I’ve seen and heard of so many horrible things being done for it, that I dread its power.”
“All very well, my dear,” interposed her father drily; “in the meantime I’d like to suggest that this isn’t the most convenient place to hold forth on economic topics. The hack is waiting and we’ll get along to the hotel if you don’t mind.”
Mary laughingly assented and the old gentleman led the way to the hack, which speedily whirled them off to the comfortable old hostelry on Purchase Street, the Parker House, where in a few minutes they were quite at home, much more so, in fact, than they had been in the immense and luxurious building of the same name in Boston.
They went to their respective rooms and again C. B. felt the sense of loss that he had experienced when first the captain was taken away from him. He had realized that sooner or later they must separate, but in his constant fashion he had not anticipated trouble of that kind and now it seemed almost as if a limb had been lopped off. It was hard work too to keep down a rising feeling of resentment against those innocent ones who had claimed their own, not being aware what C. B. had been to him. While he thus thought a bell boy came up to him and asked—
“Are you Mr. Adams?”
C. B. answered courteously that he was.
“Then,” went on the messenger, “thar’s a boy here says he’d like to speak to ye,” and turning beckoned into the apartment the same lad whom C. B. had met at the station and known as Captain Taber’s son.