"Oh, you are mistaken, uncle," answered Archy, quite confidently. "I have learned prudence, I assure you, and a great many of the other beggarly virtues," at which the Colonel smiled significantly.
"And whom, think you, have we to meet you at Bellingham besides my mother and sisters? Dolly Curtis, now a lovely girl of twenty-two, and very anxious to see her old playfellow," said Langton.
"How jolly!" was Archy's reply. But when he tried to imagine Dolly as anything but a little girl, who played with him and scrambled all over him, and rode upon his shoulders and sang songs with Judkins, he failed utterly.
Presently they rattled up to the door and were in the great hall in a moment, and Mrs. Langton's arms were around Archy's neck, and she was leading him to Lord Bellingham's chair by the fire, where the old man sat quite tremulous with joy to see him.
And Archy burst out with the very thing that pleased Lord Bellingham most:
"I wished to see all my friends in England, grandfather, but especially you; for after I went back to America and experienced your generosity in providing for me, I recalled all your kindness while I was here, and I wondered how you put up with such a presumptuous little beggar as I was."
Isabel and Mary, two handsome and dignified young women, came forward and greeted him with the utmost cordiality, and they all three burst out laughing involuntarily at the same moment, remembering their ancient squabbles.
And then a charming, beautiful, modest girl advanced, who looked at Archy with strange but not unfriendly eyes—Dolly's eyes—and gave him her hand—over which he bowed—and said to him in a sweet and thrilling voice one word which brought back the stirring past:
"Gibraltar!"