Bob Lumsden was speechless.
“Hold me; I’m a-goin’ to bu’st,” whispered Pat, by way of expressing the depth of his astonishment.
Presently Eve spoke. They could hear her faintly, yet distinctly, through the cracked and patched windows, and listened with all their ears.
“Don’t take on so, poor man,” she said in her soft loving tones. “Oh, I am so glad to hear what you say!”
Dick Martin looked up quickly.
“What!” he exclaimed, “glad to hear me say that I am the thief as stole your mother’s money! that I’m a low, vile, selfish blackguard who deserves to be kicked out o’ the North Sea fleet—off the face o’ the ’arth altogether?”
“Yes,” returned Eve, smiling through her tears—for she had been crying—“glad to hear you say all that, because Jesus came to save people like you; but He does not call them such bad names. He only calls them the ‘lost.’”
“Well, I suppose you’re right, dear child,” said the man, after a pause; “an’ I do think the Blessed Lord has saved me, for I never before felt as I do now—hatred of my old bad ways, and an awful desire to do right for His sake. If any o’ my mates had told me I’d feel an’ act like this a week ago, I’d have called him a fool. I can’t understand it. I suppose that God must have changed me altogether. My only fear is that I’ll fall back again into the old bad ways—I’m so helpless for anything good, d’ee see.”
“You forget,” returned Eve, with another of her tearful smiles; “He says, ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee’—”
“No, I don’t forget that,” interrupted Dick quickly; “that is what the young preacher in the mission smack said, an’ it has stuck to me. It’s that as keeps me up. But I didn’t come here to speak about my thoughts an’ feelin’s,” he continued, rising and taking a chair close to the bed, on which he placed a heavy bag. “I come here, Eve, to make restitootion. There’s every farthin’ I stole from your poor mother. I kep’ it intendin’ to go to Lun’on, and have a good long spree—so it’s all there. You’ll give it to her, but don’t tell her who stole it. That’s a matter ’tween you an’ me an’ the Almighty. Just you say that the miserable sinner who took it has bin saved by Jesus Christ, an’ now returns it and axes her pardon.”