He looked at her eager face and nodded slowly and solemnly. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll tell him. We shall be sure to meet, you know; I’ll certainly tell him. Good-bye!”
She smiled gratefully, and kissed her hand to him. He carried the remembrance of those last words of hers on the journey to London, and turned them over and over as he went.
CHAPTER XV.
COMETHUP PRACTISES DECEPTION.
Miss Charlotte Carlaw was awaiting the arrival of her nephew in the drawing room. “I’d have driven down, my dear boy, but I find I don’t get any lighter as time goes on, and I thought you could possess your soul in patience until you saw me. Come here, giant. Lord! what a long time it seems since you first came into this house, a scrap of humanity I had to stoop to! And now you’re so big as to make me feel uncomfortable; and your voice is deeper, and you’ve finished your school days. There, come and kiss a foolish old woman; I’m devilish proud of you, and I hear nothing but good reports of you. I’ve never said so before, but I say it now; it was the best day’s work I ever did when I found you and brought you to London.”
“A good day for me, aunt,” said Comethup, gratefully.
“That’s as it may be. I knew you’d got the right stuff in you, although if it hadn’t been for the captain I should probably have ruined you. And how is the captain?”
Comethup assured her that the captain was well, and wished to be held in remembrance by the best woman in the world.
“So that’s what he says of me, is it?” said Miss Charlotte Carlaw, laughing, and rocking herself over the head of her stick “You might have told him I was the happiest woman, if that’s got anything to do with it. Well, did you meet any one else down in Sleepy Hollow?”