“I am ashamed of myself,” he said; “I’ve left her out there all this while. And she was ill, too! There was so much else that really she escaped my memory altogether.”
He had made his way out into the hall and taken up his hat and coat.
“You will come back, won’t you?” Kate asked. “There are so many things to talk over, with all of us. And—and bring her too, if—if she will come.”
With a sign of acquiescence and comprehension. Reuben darted down the steps and into the darkness. In a very few minutes he returned, disappointment written all over his face.
“She’s gone. Gedney, the man I left with the sleigh, says she went off as soon as I had got out of sight. I had offered to have him drive her home, but she refused. She’s a curiously independent girl.”
“I am very sorry,” said Kate. “But I will go over the first thing in the morning and thank her.”
“You don’t as yet know the half of what you have to thank her for,” put in the lawyer. “I don’t mean that it was so great a thing—my coming—but she drove all the way out to my mother’s farm to bring me here to-night, and fainted when she got there. She was really ill. If her father is still here, I think he’d better go at once to her place, and see about her.”
The suggestion seemed a good one, and was instantly acted upon. Ben Lawton had been in the kitchen, immensely proud of his position as the responsible garrison of a beleaguered house, and came out into the hallway now with a full stomach and a satisfied expression on his lank face.
He assented with readiness to Reuben’s idea, when it was explained to him.
“So she druv out to your mother’s place for you, did she?” he commented, admiringly. “That girl’s a genuwine chip of the old block. I mean,” he added, with an apologetic smile, “of the old, old block. I ain’t got so much git-up-and-git about me, that I know of, but her grandfather was a regular snorter!”