“I saw him first. We knew you’d come back, Jeff; huzzah!”
“That tricycle wants looking to awful bad. Our feet touch the ground on it now, Jeff.”
“Come on to the shed, I say, and put it right. How brickish of you to come back, Jeff!”
A long afternoon the happy Jeff spent over that intractable tricycle. It was past all repair; but no feat of engineering was ever applauded as were the one or two touches by which he contrived to make it stand upright and bear the weight of a boy. Before the work was over Farmer Rosher had joined them, well pleased at his boys’ delight.
“Thee’s paid oop for thy sin, lad,” said he. “I did thee and the lads more harm than I meant; but thee’s a home here whenever thee likes, to make up for it; and come away and see the missus and have a drop of tea.”
From the farmer, who may have had good reason for knowing, Jeffreys learned that Mrs Trimble was comfortably quartered in an almshouse; and there, next morning—for there was do escaping from Ash Cottage that night—he found her, and soothed her with the news he had to tell of her poor prodigal.
“Well, well,” she said, “God is merciful; and He will reward you, John, as He had pity on the lad. And now will you be sure and take a mother’s blessing to the sweet lady, and tell her if she ever wants to make an old woman happy, he has only to come here, and let me see her and kiss her for what she has done for me and mine?”
That message he delivered a week later as he walked with Raby one afternoon in Regent’s Park. It was not exactly a chance walk. They had both been up to the orphanage at Hampstead with the reluctant Tim and his brother, to leave them there in good motherly hands till the troubles of infancy should be safely passed.
It was Tim who had insisted on having the escort of both his natural guardians on the occasion; and at such a time and on such an errand Tim’s word was law. So they had gone all four in a cab, and now Raby and Jeffreys returned, and with a sense of bereavement, through the Park.
“I will certainly go and see Mrs Trimble when next I am North,” said Raby, “though I wish I deserved half her gratitude.”