“Surmise is not the word, Mr. Horn; I know she’s come back!”
“Of course you do,” interposed Miss Jemima, in emphatic tones.
Tommy looked gratefully towards the hitherto dreadful lady; and she regarded him with eyes which seemed to say, “you have won my favour once for all.”
“Can you tell us, Tommy,” asked “Cobbler” Horn, “what has made you so very sure?”
“Yes,” replied Tommy, with energy, “I’ll tell you. Everything has made me sure—the way she walks along the street, with her head up, and putting her foot down as if a regiment of soldiers wouldn’t stop her; and her manner of coming into the shop and saying, ‘How are you to-day, Mr. Dudgeon?’ and her sitting in the old arm-chair, and putting her head on one side like a knowing little bird, and asking questions about everything, and letting her eyes shine on you like stars. Begging your pardon, Mr. Horn, she’s just the little lassie all over. Why I should know her with my eyes shut, if she were only to speak up, and say, ‘Well, Tommy, how are you, to-day?’”
“But,” asked “Cobbler” Horn, whose heart, secretly, was almost bursting with delight, “may you not be mistaken, after all?”
“I am not mistaken,” replied Tommy firmly.
“But it’s such a long while ago,” suggested “Cobbler” Horn; “and—and she will be very much altered by this time. You can’t be sure that a young woman is the same person as a little girl you haven’t seen for more than a dozen years.”
Herein, perhaps, “Cobbler” Horn’s own chief difficulty lay. “How,” he asked, “can I think of Marian as being other than a little girl?” Tommy Dudgeon did not seem to be troubled in that way at all.
“Yes,” he said, “I can be quite sure when I have known the little girl as I knew that one; and when I have watched, and listened to, the young woman, as I have been watching and listening to the sec’tary for these months past.”