“Father! father!”
“Ralph, boy!”
“Your runaway son,” said Ralph, laughing.
“My sailor boy!” said his father, smiling in his turn.
Those last words made Ralph’s heart bound with joy. He knew his father well, and he knew when he said “my sailor boy” that he did not mean to repent his promise anent the yacht.
Allan was talking to his mother and sister, Helen McGregor hanging on his arm, and looking fondly up in his face.
But poor Irish Rory stood shyly by himself, close by the drawbridge gate. At present there was nobody to speak to him; for the time being, at all events, there was no one to bid him welcome back.
“Och!” he said to himself, with a sigh, “the never a father nor mother have I. Sure I never remember feeling before that I was an orphan entirely.”
A big cold nose was thrust into his hand. Then a great dog rubbed its shoulder with rough but genuine kindness against his legs. It was Bran’s mother, and her behaviour affected him so that he was almost letting fall a tear on her honest head, when he suddenly spied old Janet, and off went the cloud from his brow in a moment—and off went he, to pump-shake the old lady by the hand, and vow to her that this was the happiest day in his life.
And old Janet must needs wipe her eyes with her apron as she called him, much to his amusement, “mo chree” and “mo ghoal” (love), and “the bonnie boy that he was,” and a hundred other flattering and endearing epithets, that made Rory laugh and pump-shake her hand again, and feel on the whole as merry as a cricket. But when Helen herself came running towards him, and placed both her hands in his and welcomed him “home,” then his cup of joy was about full, and he entirely forgot he was an orphan. Then she dragged him over to her mother, and the first greetings over—