The little cobbler drew his hand across his eyes in an embarrassed fashion; he was evidently trying to recollect something.
"Ma'am sends her humble duty," he answered presently in a sing-song voice, "and she is greatly obliged to you and the kind lady, and Kit may stay along of Mrs. Sullivan—those were her very words, sir."
"Mrs. Martin is a sensible woman then."
"Oh, she is that, sir. She was scolding me all supper-time for not thinking of the child's good. 'You can bring her back if you like, Caleb,' she says, 'and poison her with the filthy fogs, and get her ready for her coffin, poor lamb. And you call yourself a father, Caleb Martin? Drat all such fathers, I say!' She made me clean ashamed of myself, did Ma'am;" and here the little man looked ready to cry.
"Well, Mr. Martin, I do think the child will be better here, and you can come down every three weeks or so to see her—you know we have arranged that—and now and then you can bring your wife too;" and Caleb brightened up at this.
But the day he left Rotherwood he was so lugubrious and tearful that Malcolm felt quite sorry for him; but Kit took a less depressing view.
"I don't want you to go, dad," she said feelingly; "but I like staying along with this good lady," with a friendly nod of her head to Mrs. Sullivan. "I have got a black kitten of my own and a yellow chick, and they are better than dolls because they can love me back. And the ladies from the Wood House are going to take me out for drives—my, won't that be 'eavenly!" Nevertheless Kit shed a few tears when Caleb closed the little gate behind him. "I want to stay here, and I want daddy too," she said rather pitifully.
All these weeks Malcolm had seen nothing of Cedric. His visit to the Jacobis had been prolonged for another ten days, and then he wrote, in high spirits, to tell his sisters that Dick Wallace had invited him to go down to his father's place in Scotland.
"I expect I shall have rare sport there, and stalk a deer or two," he continued. "Dick and I are to go down by the night mail on Thursday, but I will run over to Staplegrove for a few hours. Tell Herrick I will look him up at his diggings."
By some oversight Elizabeth forgot to give Malcolm this message, and Malcolm, who had to go up to town on business, was much chagrined to find that Cedric had called during his absence, and had been greatly disappointed at missing him.