'Tell your men I'll hunt them down like rats if I hear of it,' said I.
While we were conversing my father arrived. Eveleen, not knowing him, would have had me accept the friendly covering of a mat.
'Here 's a big one! he's a clergyman,' she muttered to herself, and ran to him and set up a gipsy whine, fronting me up to the last step while she advanced; she only yielded ground to my outcry.
My father bent over me. Kiomi had prepared him for what he saw. I quieted his alarm by talking currently and easily. Julia Bulsted had despatched a messenger to inform him of my mysterious disappearance; but he, as his way was, revelling in large conjectures, had half imagined me seized by a gust of passion, and bound for Germany. 'Without my luggage?' I laughed.
'Ay, without your luggage, Richie,' he answered seriously. His conceit of a better knowledge of me than others possessed, had buoyed him up. 'For I knew,' he said, 'we two do nothing like the herd of men. I thought you were off to her, my boy. Now!' he looked at me, and this look of dismay was a perfect mirror. I was not a presentable object.
He stretched his limbs on the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. Eveleen hung near.
'These people have been kind to you?' he said.
'No, the biggest brutes on the earth,' said I.
'Oh! you say that, when I spotted you out in the dark where you might have lied to be eaten, and carried you and washed your bloody face, and watched you, and never slept, I didn't, to mother you and wet your head!' cried the girl.
My father beckoned to her and thanked her appreciably in the yellow tongue.