A burst of voices came into the apartment. Uncle Joe turned wonderingly. Miss Amanda stood up. Carolyn May flew out of bed with a shriek that startled them both.
“My papa! My mamma! I hear them! They’re not drownd-ed! God didn’t let ’em be lost at sea!”
She was out of the room in her nightgown, pattering in bare feet over the floor. A brown man, with a beard and twinkling blue eyes, caught her up in strong arms and hugged her swiftly—safely—to his breast.
“Snuggy!” he said chokingly. “Papa’s Snuggy!”
“My baby! My baby!” cried the woman at whom Joseph Stagg was staring as though he believed her to be the ghost of his lost sister Hannah.
It was several hours later before there was a really sane thing said or a sane thing done in that little Harlem flat.
“It’s like a lovely fairy story!” cried Carolyn May. “Only it’s better than a fairy story—it’s real!”
“Yes, yes, it’s real, thank God!” murmured the happy mother.
“And I’m never going away from my little girl again,” added the father, kissing her for at least the tenth time.
“But what Aunty Rose is going to do, I don’t see,” said Uncle Joe, shaking his head with real commiseration. “I’ve sent her a despatch saying that the child is safe. But if we go back without Hannah’s Car’lyn——”