"O yes! He has," Morris answered frankly. "He did so much mischief they thought it must be me, and put me to bed very early, with only bread and milk for my supper."
They found the monkey fast asleep. His owner gave him two or three pokes with his cane, and he opened his round black eyes. He knew his master at once, and with the funniest grin, leaped on to his shoulder, fastening his hairy little paws tightly round his neck as though he never meant to let go.
"I will look to it that he runs away not soon again," said the gentleman as he left the house.
"Then you had better tie him up very tight, sir, with a very strong chain," advised Morris, closing the door with an honest little sigh of relief.
[MABEL'S "INASMUCH."]
NURSE HAMMOND was in a fidgety state of mind; it was an hour past the time when Miss Mabel should have returned from taking her music lesson. As it was a rare thing for Mabel to be otherwise than prompt, her old nurse was growing uneasy. Nurse Hammond had been in the Taylor family ever since Mabel, who was now a young lady of sixteen, was born. All through the years of babyhood and childhood the good woman had watched over her young charge, and now, when she had grown almost to womanhood, she still exercised the same tender, loving watchfulness.
Mabel Taylor's mother died before the child had learned to speak the sweet name of mother. And in all the years that followed, Mabel had only Nurse Hammond to go to for love and petting. Mr. Taylor was a kind father, but he was always at the office, and Mabel saw little of him. And besides, the loss of his wife had cast a shadow over his life which he had never been able to throw off.
At length the anxious woman could endure the anxiety no longer, and putting on her bonnet, and the soft white shawl which Mabel's own fingers had knitted for her, she started out to "see what had become of the child."
The Taylor home was set down in the edge of a lovely piece of woodland; a park, a more pretentious man would have called it. That which was only a village when Mr. Taylor's father built the house, had grown into a city, and had stretched itself out to the boundary of the Taylor place, where it was forced to stop; for Mr. Taylor would not yield an inch of the homestead, nor suffer the woodland to be cleared. By a path through the woods Mabel was accustomed to make a short cut to the house of the music professor whose pupil she was, and Nurse Hammond hoped by taking this path to meet her charge. Sure enough, she came upon her suddenly. The young girl had thrown herself upon the ground beside an old, half-decayed log, and was quietly weeping. The woman who stood watching her for a moment knew that there had been a storm of tears, and that this quiet had come only after the violence of the grief was spent. Hat and music-roll lay upon the ground, and the attitude of the girl was one of dejection.
"What is the matter with my darling child?" asked the kind-hearted woman.