"Got his head where it ought to be—on his shoulders; and it ain't for playing football with," was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she could not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a long history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and whom even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to "discover" when he lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing as a canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and becoming means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature of contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice it was she. She looked a soprano.
What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry's coat in her hand it would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house, the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
"Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies'
Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"'
She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of laying his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had said aloud to herself, "Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" Perhaps—and perhaps not.
As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway—a figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
"Villain'!" he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient moods—after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. "Hither with my coat; my spotless coat in a spotted world,—the unbelievable anomaly—
"'For the earth of a dusty to-day
Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.'"
When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought it was clever beyond thinking—a heavenly jumble. "If it wasn't for me you'd be carted for rubbish," she replied joyously as she helped him on with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
"I heard you singing—what was it?" he asked cheerily, while it could be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time, with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or rear- guard or what you will:
"'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft—'"