And then the Little Lady's eyes, which had wandered past him from sheer dread of looking on his hopelessness, opened wider than ever they had done before.
"Charles! Charles!" she shrieked, pointing past him down the path. "Jim!" And she began to dance and scream in a very allowable fit of hysterics.
Eager thought it was that--that her overwrought feelings had broken down, and it was to her that he sprang.
But the others had turned at her words, and had run out of the cottage, and now they came in dragging--as though having got him they would never let him go again--a very lean and dirty and draggled, but decidedly happy, Jim.
Gracie broke from her brother and rushed at him with a whole-hearted "Oh, Jim! Jim!" and flung her arms round his neck and kissed him many times. And Jim, grinning joyously through his dirt, seemed to find it good, but presently wiped off the kisses with the back of his grimy hand.
"Dear lad, where have you been?" cried Eager, all his weariness gone in the joy of recovery. "We have been near breaking all our hearts over you. Thank God, you are back again! . . . Now, tell us!"
And Jim summed up his adventures in very few words.
"I was on the shore. Some men carried me off in a ship. We were wrecked at a place called Morecambe, and I've come home as quick as I could."
"Who were the men? Did you know them?" asked Sir George sternly.
"I can't tell you, sir." And then, looking at Eager, as though he would understand. "It was a promise, a very solemn promise"--and Eager nodded. "You see I was locked up in a little cabin when the ship was wrecked, and I should have been drowned in there----"