Kate was summoned. She gathered up in her apron the piles of curls that she had made, and went in haste to hear what proved to be quite a story.
“Maybe,” said Harry, “you’d like to know what became of your pretty necklace, that you tucked into somebody’s vest-pocket that went out West once upon a time.”
“How did you know?” cried Kate, stopping in the center of the room, and getting so surprised and confused and flushed, and everything, that she let fall her dandelion curls on Grandma Dobson’s lovely rag carpet, and instantly fell upon her knees to gather them up again.
“O, your brother told me that you put it in the box; but he does not know how I came to see it after it came out of the box. Jack Flibbit—”
“What a funny name!” cried Kate. “Is he a little boy?”
“Yes, and a fisherman’s boy, too; and he was left all alone after the fires—for his father and mother, and every one of his folks, were caught in the house, and hadn’t time to get away; and Jack was staying that night in a house down by the lake, or he would have been lost, too. So after it was all over, Jack was taken by a good, kind lady to Port Huron, and everybody felt so sorry for him that when he got there somebody gave him out of one of the boxes a very nice suit of clothes, and I saw Jack when he was carrying it along the street. When he met me, he wanted me to see it, and wouldn’t let me go until after we had been in and sat down on the steps of a church, and opened the bundle. Well, when it was open, and he shook out the little vest, there jingled down on the stone something that I picked up; it was a necklace, and I ’most know ’twas yours, ’cause I remember there was something inside it.”
“O, what?” cried Kate. Mrs. Hallock had ceased to sew in her eagerness to learn more.
“Well,” said Harry, “there was so much to remember about then, that maybe I’m not right; but it was, I reckon, something like this: ‘Kate; from Grandmother De—De—Deborah,’ or something like that.”
“That’s just it—my own Grandma Hallock’s right name!” cried Kate; “and I s’pose I was very wicked to give it away, only everybody was so sorry then for the poor, burnt-out folks, and I hadn’t anything else that I thought as much of to give.”
“It is all very wonderful, my boy,” said Mrs. Hallock. “Do you know what became of Jack Flibbit?”