"I can't, Tommy. I must go home this minute; Ma will be wonderin' where I am. There! do let me go, Tommy!"
A window was raised in the house opposite, and the wheezy voice of Mrs. Weight was heard:
"Annie Lizzie, where are you? Don't you l'iter there now, and me ketchin' my everlastin' hollerin' for you. Come in this minute, do you hear?"
There was a soft sound that was not a voice; and Annie Lizzie slipped back like a shadow across the road.
"I'm comin', Ma!" she said. "It's real warm and pleasant out, but I'm comin' right in."
"Do you see any one round?" asked the Deacon's widow.
Annie Lizzie shut her eyes tight, for she was a truthful girl. "No'm," she said; "I don't."
In the Captain's room, Mr. Homer's favorite apartment, the two brothers stood and looked each other in the face. As Tommy said, the likeness was intimate, spite of the difference in color: the same figure, the same gestures, the same general effect of waviness in outline, of flutter in motion; yet, to speak in paradox, with a difference in the very likeness. There was an abruptness of address in the newcomer, foreign to the gentle ambiguous flow of Mr. Homer's speech; where Mr. Homer waved, Mr. Pindar jerked; where Mr. Homer fluttered feebly, his brother fluttered vivaciously. They fluttered now, both of them, as they stood facing each other. For a moment neither found words, but it was Mr. Pindar who spoke first.
"I have surprised you, brother!" he cried; "confess it! Surprise, chief tidbit at the Feast of Life! Alarums and excursions! enter King Henry, with forces marching. You did not expect to see the Wanderer?"
"I certainly did not, my dear brother!" cried Mr. Homer, the tears standing in his mild eyes. "I have not even felt sure, Pindar, of your being alive in these latter years. Why, why have you kept this silence, my dear fellow? think how many years it is since I have heard a word from you!"