"All right!" said Val. "Run and put your things on, and don't be an hour about it, if you can help it."
Laura ran off, and reappeared in a quarter of the allotted time, turbaned and mantled, and furred, and tripped along through the moonlit and gaslit streets, with her new fiancé down to the wharf. The fine night had, as usual, drawn crowds down there, and the wharf was all bustle, and excitement, and uproar. Miss Blair, clinging confidingly to Mr. Blake's arm, watched the passengers making their way through the tumult to where the cabs were waiting, when all of a sudden she dropped the arm she held, with a little shrill feminine scream, and darting forward, plumped head foremost into the arms of a gentleman coming up the wharf, valise in hand. To say that Mr. Blake stared aghast would be a mild way of putting it; but stare he undoubtedly did, with might and main. The gentleman wore a long, loose overcoat, heavily furred, and his face was partially shaded by a big, black, California hat; but Val saw the handsome, sun-browned face beneath for all that, with its thick, dark mustache and beard. Could it be? surely not, with all those whiskers and that brown skin; and yet—and yet, it did look like: but by this time Laura had got out of the mustached stranger's coat-sleeves, and was back, breathless with excitement, beside the staring editor.
"Oh, Val! it's Charley!—it's Charley Marsh! Charley Marsh!" Charley, sure enough, in spite of the whiskers and the sun-brown. Val was beside him in two strides, shaking both hands as if he meant to wrench the arms from their sockets.
"My dear boy! my dear boy! my dear boy!" was all Mr. Blake could get out, while he spoke, and shook poor Charley's hands; and Laura performed a little jig of ecstasy around them, to the great delight of sundry small boys looking on. As for Charley himself, there were tears in his blue eyes, even while he laughed at Val.
"Dear old Val!" he said, "it is a sight for sair een to look at your honest face again! Dear old boy! there is no place like home!"
"Come along," cried Val, hooking his arm in Charley's. "The people are gaping as if we had two heads on us! Here's a cab; get in, Laura; jump after her, Charley. Now, then, driver, No. 12 Golden Row!"
"Hold on!" exclaimed Charley, laughing at his phlegmatic friend's sudden excitement, "I cannot permit myself to be abducted in this manner. I must go to Cottage Street."
"Come home with us first," said Val, gravely. "I have something to tell you—something you ought to know before you go to Cottage Street."
"My mother!" Charley cried, in sudden alarm; "she is ill—something is wrong."
"No, she's not! Your mother is well, and nothing is wrong. Be patient for ten minutes, and you'll find out what I mean!"