As we reached the house I saw an empty coffee-cup, with a spoon in it, set upon the outer sill of a window that opened upon the porch.
“Has a tramp been here, Loveday?” I asked; for she was tender-hearted toward the highway fraternity.
“There was a man here that I gave a cup of coffee to,” said Loveday with evidently no mind for details.
“Did he come up the road from the shipyard?” I asked eagerly and with a sinking of the heart—for of course there were men who looked like Uncle Horace. “And was he very tall and angular?”
“Land, Miss Bathsheba, I don’t know which way he came nor which way he went, and I never got nobody to take his pictur!” said Loveday crisply. “I know he looked white and wore out and hadn’t no appreciation of good victuals. He shook his head at everything I offered him and swallered the coffee as if it wa’n’t no better’n spring bitters.”
It seemed unlikely that Loveday would take such liberties with Uncle Horace as to offer him a cup of coffee—he was not a person with whom any one took liberties. But the glare was reassuring; and it was just possible that there had been a tramp.
Dave received the letter from Ned Carruthers that night. I knew that he had by his face when he entered the house. The “aliens” both have telltale faces. We older ones have countenances of the grave New England type and far less mobile.
There had not been such a look as this on Dave’s face since that dreadful Thanksgiving day. My heart thrilled with the thought that I had had a little share, at least, in the hastening of his joy.
“I want Estelle!” was what he said. And besides being natural, since she was his very own, I said to myself that it was just. How did Mohammed explain his devotion to his old and ugly wife? “It was Chadidja who believed in me.”
But I walked the floor until Estelle called me to her studio at the top of the house where Dave had found her.