He whirled round in vast amazement, and got a shock.
"Kattie! . . . oh, Kattie!"
"I did so want to see you before you went. I only heard to-day----"
She looked so pretty in the fluttering light of the lamp, so touchingly soft and sweet, like some beautiful wild bird drawn to a possibly hostile hand by stress of need and prepared for instant flight.
She was very nicely dressed too, better than he had ever seen her before, in well-fitting dark clothes and a little fur pork-pie hat, like the one Gracie used to wear in the winter. And under it her eyes shone brightly and her face glowed and quivered with many emotions.
The passers-by were beginning to notice and look back at them. He led her into a quieter side-street where there was almost no traffic.
"But what are you doing here, Kattie? We have been searching for you for a month past, and now----"
"I couldn't help it, Jim. I had to come----"
"But why, Kattie? Why? Do you know what you've done by running away like that?" And he could not keep the feeling out of his voice, as he thought of poor old Seth, and her mother, and the broken home. "Your mother is dead. It killed her." Kattie's hands were over her face and she was sobbing. "And your father came to London to look for you, and got run over. His hand was in mine as he died, and his last words were for you, 'Tell her to come home!' he said, and then he died."
The slender figure shook with sobs. Perhaps he had been too brutal to blurt it out like that. He ought to have broken it to her by degrees.