Donald was gone. They had seen him off at the station—Harold and she—and Donald, never allowing himself for a moment to regard this whole affair in any light but the true one, kept a stiff upper lip to the last, and smiled the cheeriest good-by as the guard banged the carriage-door and the train glided out from the depot. Before he jumped on the train, however, he had whispered, as the last of many entreaties: “I know it's all for my sake, Marie-Celeste, but all the same, it's an awful grind on me the way you're acting; and if you don't come to see it so pretty soon, your father and mother will wish they had never let you do anything for me. Honor bright, Marie-Celeste, you're not fair to them or to me at all. Please give in as soon as you go home, and say you're sorry, because you are—you know you are.” And it was the “yes, I am” in Marie-Celeste's eyes, though her lips still firmly pressed each other, that made Donald's heart a thousand-fold lighter. And so, as you have read, Marie-Celeste did really give in, without so much as a mental reservation, and other hearts than Donald's were wondrously lightened, and there was joy throughout all the kingdom that the queen had come to her senses.
Meantime, Donald's train made good time to Nuneham; and there was Chris at the station waiting with open arms to receive him, and, what was more, he took Donald into them in a way that nipped in the bud those queer little misgivings that spring up unbidden when one chances to be leaving old scenes for new. And then when they reached the cottage, there stood dear old Mis, Hartley, looking the picture of motherliness in her snow-white cap and kerchief; and the welcome that she gave Donald made him feel beyond all doubting that he had but exchanged one dear home for another; and that meant worlds to a boy who had come to know for the first time what a dear place home might be.
In the hour that intervened between Donald's arrival and supper he had had a chat with Mr. Hartley, in which the old keeper had taken to the boy immensely; had made friends with Martha, as she showed him to the little room under the eaves and helped him to stow away the contents of his sailor chest, and had won his way straight to Mrs. Hartley's heart, who was but a woman, after all, and gratified by the undisguised admiration in his frank, honest eyes. There remained only one inmate of the cottage yet to be encountered—the gentleman about whom Chris had told him, and who had met with the driving accident a few weeks back; but the gentleman in question bad his own ideas as to the time and place when that dreaded encounter was to be gotten through with, and Donald was not to be favored with an interview that evening.
“If it's not too much bother, Mrs. Hartley,” Ted had said, “I'll have my supper here in my room to-night. I think for a first drive Harry took me a little too far this afternoon.”
“I was afraid of that—afraid of that,” said Mrs. Hartley, looking at Ted with the deepest solicitude, so that Ted felt like a fraud, for though tired indeed from the drive, he had quite strength enough to take his seat at the table with the rest but for the presence of that new and undesired guest, Donald.
“Your sailor-boy arrived all right?” asked Ted, partly by way of diverting conversation from himself and partly because there was the possibility of meeting him to be provided against.
“Yes, indeed,” her face lighting up as she spoke; “and he seems the most attractive little fellow. I want you should meet him after—”