Then Brown came to him with a telegram summoning him to the sickbed of his only sister, and within an hour he left the city, and was absent two weeks.
Meantime Tode, the morning after his scrubbing and whitewashing operations, had carefully folded the clothes he had worn when he left the bishop's house and tied them up in an old newspaper. Into one of the pockets of the jacket he had put a note which ran thus:
DEAR MRS. MARTIN:
Pleas giv thes cloes to the bishop and tell him i wud not have took them away if i had had any others. I did not take shoes or stockins. I keep the littel testament and i read in it evry day. Tell him i am trying to be good and when i get good enuf I shall go and see him. You was good to me but he was so good that he made me hate myself and evrything bad. I can never be bad again while i remember him.
TODE BRYAN.
He hired a boy whom he knew, to carry the bundle to the bishop's house, and from behind a tree-box further down the street, he watched and saw it taken in by Brown. The boy's heart was beating hard and fast, as he stood there longing, yet dreading, to see the bishop himself come out of the house. But the bishop was far away, and Tode walked sadly homeward, casting many a wistful, lingering glance backward, as he went.
Brown carried the package gingerly to Mrs. Martin, for the boy who had delivered it was not over clean, and Mrs. Martin opened it with some suspicion, but when she saw the clothes she recognised them instantly, and finding the note in the pocket read it with wet eyes.
"I knew that wasn't a bad boy," she said to herself, "and this proves it. He's as honest as the day, or he wouldn't have sent back these clothes--the poor little fellow. Well, well! I hope the bishop can find him when he gets back, and as to the boy's pretending to be deaf and dumb, I'm sure there was something underneath that if we only knew it. Anyhow, I do hope I'll see the little fellow again sometime."
When the bishop returned the accumulated work of his weeks of absence so pressed upon him that for a while he had no time for anything else, and when at last he was free to search for Tode, he could find no trace of him.
As for Tode, he had never once thought of the possibility of the bishop's searching for him. He looked forward to seeing his friend again sometime, but that time he put far away when he himself should be "more fit," as he said to himself.
One evening soon after his return, Nan had a long talk with him, a talk that left her wondering greatly at the change in his thoughts and purposes, and which made her regard him with quite a new feeling of respect.
"Nan," he began, "I told you I'd got loads of things to do now."