"Be sure you don't forget to look us up to-night."
VI
Hastings did not look behind him, as with lowered head he ran along the railroad track to the station, jumped into a cab and urged the driver to speed to the house where his mother must be waiting.
Some one within heard his footstep, knew it for what she craved most to hear, and was in the doorway of her room, when he saw her. Picking her up like a child, he covered her white hair, her tired face, her hands with kisses, and as she clung weeping on his breast, he carried her to a big armchair in the bay window. He was on his knees with his rumpled head in her lap when she found broken voice to say:
"Oh, Jack, are you well? Are you all right? My own precious boy! I have come to comfort and love you. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters to me, now that I have found you safe and sound."
She twisted her slim fingers in his thick brown hair, and as she felt the warm pressure of his head in her lap, the years had stepped aside, and he was the little boy who used to flee to that dear sanctuary in every time of trial. And to her this was only another trouble, which only Mother could understand and clear from his path. When at length he looked up, she was shocked to see the shadow circles under his eyes, and the nervous twitching of the mouth that was so very like his mother's. He was sobbing, and not ashamed of it, as he murmured:
"I have been disgraced and disappointed, but I don't care any more now that I have found you. Are you all right, Little Mother? Did you think I had deserted you?"
She told him of the race as she had seen it, and was with difficulty dissuaded from planning to search out the Head Coach, crying with the angry sparkle he loved of old:
"It is not ladylike, Jack, but I would like to scratch his horrid eyes out. Of course, he should have kept you on the crew, but we are not going to cry over spilt milk, are we? I want you to tell me all about it—everything—so that we can look and find some consolation. Every cloud has a silver lining."