"You look as if you might cut and run," said Mr. Horton cheerfully. "And you and I must have a little talk first. Olive, here's the chap who found Sunny Boy."
Mrs. Horton, still holding Sunny Boy in her arms, smiled with wet dark eyes at Tim.
"She certainly was pretty," said Tim afterward to his mother. "Tall as Theresa, and young and dressed up nice and all. But she shook hands with me just as if I was a friend of hers. I guess all mothers are nice and friendly."
By this time a little crowd had gathered about the Hortons, for many of the guests at the hotel had heard that Sunny Boy was lost and they wanted to tell his father and mother how glad they were that he was safely found. Tim began to get decidedly restless.
"I got to go," he whispered to Mr. Horton. "Ma won't know what's keeping me. 'Sides I have to be up at five in the morning to cover my paper route."
"Olive," said Mr. Horton to his wife, "suppose you take the boy up. I want to have a little talk with Tim" (for Sunny of course had told them his name) "and we're going into the grill room where there won't be so many people. I guess we can have a bite to eat if we have had supper."
"And we had Welsh rabbit and coffee," Tim recounted to his admiring family later that night. "The grill room's just a restaurant. I'll bet that waiter didn't want me coming in there looking like a tramp, but Mr. Horton never let on I looked any different from the rest of 'em."
Sunny Boy and his mother went up in the elevator, and after they were in their room, while she undressed him, "for," she said, "I'm so glad to have my baby back I must undress him and put him to bed just as I used to when he was really a baby," he told her about the Harritys and how he had met Tim.
"We rode up and down in the subway, hunting for you," explained Mrs. Horton. "Daddy asked every guard, and I even asked the ticket sellers if they had seen a little boy in a blue suit. Then we thought you might have remembered the name of the hotel, and we hurried back here in case you should manage to get here before we did."
"Did you cry?" asked Sunny Boy, patting her cheek, as he lay in her lap.