“It’s a sad loss, a sad loss,” returned the captain, as he helped the ladies into the carriage. “But where are the rest of us?” he added. “We can’t leave our boys.”
“They’re coming, they’re running like everything,” cried Weezy, standing upon the wagon-seat to look. “Kirke is holding something up high, and shaking it.”
“It’s a bag!” shouted Molly, clapping her hands. “I do believe it’s Miss Evans’s bag!”
“I’ve found it! Found it just outside the park,” yelled Kirke, when within hearing distance. “It’s all right. The dew hasn’t hurt it!”
It seems that in leaving the park Kirke had seen the glitter of steel under the luxuriant ivy at its entrance, and stooping to brush aside the vines, had touched the clasp of the lost reticule.
“I suppose the chain caught upon the fence when you squeezed through that narrow gap, Miss Evans,” said he, in winding up his story.
“Yes, Miss Evans, it must have caught and twitched your bag off so quickly that you didn’t know it,” added Paul, as the carriage rolled on; “and then the bag fell into that tangle of leaves where nobody noticed it but Kirke. His eyes are as sharp as a razor.”
“Fortunately for me, Paul!” Miss Evans was half-laughing, half-crying. “O Kirke, I can’t be grateful enough to you for bringing this back to me!”
Kirke blushed with pleasure, and Paul felt a momentary pang of regret that he had not discovered the valued article himself.
He looked on with interest as Miss Evans drew from the alligator-skin bag a parcel neatly encased in oiled silk. It was her father’s manuscript, written in a fine clear hand, upon very thin commercial paper.