Are you sure?"

"Yes, Kent," softly, "I am sure."

"But you can't love me. You are sure that your--You have no reason to be grateful to me, but you have said you were, you know. You are sure you are not doing this because--"

"I am sure. It is not because I am grateful."

"But, my dear--think! Think what it means, I am--"

"I know what you are," tenderly. "No one knows as well. But, Kent--Kent, are YOU sure? It isn't pity for me?"

I think I convinced her that it was not pity. I know I tried. And I was still trying when the sound of steps and voices on the other side of the shrubbery caused us--or caused her; I doubt if I should have heard anything except her voice just then--to start and exclaim:

"Someone is coming! Don't, dear, don't! Someone is coming."

It was the Crippses who were coming, of course. Mr. and Mrs. Cripps and Hephzy. They would have come sooner, I learned afterwards, but Hephzy had prevented it.

Solomon's red face was redder still when he saw us together. And Mrs.

Cripps' mouth looked more like "a crack in a plate" than ever.

"So!" she exclaimed. "Here's where you are! I thought as much. And you--you brazen creature!"

I objected strongly to "brazen creature" as a term applied to my future wife. I intended saying so, but Mr. Cripps got ahead of me.

"You get off my grounds," he blurted, waving his fist. "You get out of 'ere now or I'll 'ave you put off. Do you 'ear?"

I should have answered him as he deserved to be answered, but Frances would not let me.

"Don't, Kent," she whispered. "Don't quarrel with him, please. He is going, Mr. Cripps. We are going--now."

Mrs. Cripps fairly shrieked. "WE are going?" she repeated. "Do you mean you are going with him?"

Hephzy joined in, but in a quite different tone.

"You are goin'?" she said, joyfully. "Oh, Frances, are you comin' with us?"

It was my turn now and I rejoiced in the prospect. An entire brigade of Crippses would not have daunted me then. I should have enjoyed defying them all.

"Yes," said I, "she is coming with us, Hephzy. Mr. Cripps, will you be good enough to stand out of the way? Come, Frances."

It is not worth while repeating what Mr. and Mrs. Cripps said. They said a good deal, threatened all sorts of things, lawsuits among the rest.

Hephzy fired the last guns for our side.

"Yes, yes," she retorted, impatiently. "I know you're goin' to sue. Go ahead and sue and prosecute yourselves to death, if you want to. The lawyers'll get their fees out of you, and that's some comfort--though I shouldn't wonder if THEY had to sue to get even that. And I tell you this: If you don't send Little Frank's--Miss Morley's trunks to Mayberry inside of two days we'll come and get 'em and we'll come with the sheriff and the police."

Mrs. Cripps, standing by the gate, fell back upon her last line of intrenchments, the line of piety.

"And to think," she declared, with upturned eyes, "that this is the 'oly Sabbath! Never mind, Solomon. The Lord will punish 'em. I shall pray to Him not to curse them too hard."

Hephzy's retort was to the point.

"I wouldn't," she said. "If I had been doin' what you two have been up to, pretendin' to care for a young girl and offerin' to give her a home, and all the time doin' it just because I thought I could squeeze money out of her, I shouldn't trouble the Lord much. I wouldn't take the risk of callin' His attention to me."

CHAPTER XVIII

In Which the Pilgrimage Ends Where It Began

We did not go to Mayberry that day. We went to London and to the hotel; not Bancroft's, but the hotel where Hephzy and I had stayed the previous night. It was Frances' wish that we should not go to Bancroft's.

"I don't think that I could go there, Kent," she whispered to me, on the train. "Mr. and Mrs Jameson were very kind, and I liked them so much, but--but they would ask questions; they wouldn't understand. It would be hard to make them understand. Don't you see, Kent?"

I saw perfectly. Considering that the Jamesons believed Miss Morley to be my niece, it would indeed be hard to make them understand. I was not inclined to try. I had had quite enough of the uncle and niece business.

So we went to the other hotel and if the clerk was surprised to see us again so soon he said nothing about it. Perhaps he was not surprised. It must take a good deal to surprise a hotel clerk.

On the train, in our compartment--a first-class compartment, you may be sure; I would have hired the whole train if it had been necessary; there was nothing too good or too expensive for us that afternoon--on the train, discussing the ride to London, Hephzy did most of the talking.

I was too happy to talk much and Frances, sitting in her corner and pretending to look out of the window, was silent also. I should have been fearful that she was not happy, that she was already repenting her rashness in promising to marry the Bayport "quahaug," but occasionally she looked at me, and, whenever she did, the wireless message our eyes exchanged, sent that quahaug aloft on a flight through paradise. A flying clam is an unusual specimen, I admit, but no other quahaug in this wide, wide world had an excuse like mine for developing wings.

Hephzy did not appear to notice our silence. She chatted and laughed continuously. We had not told her our secret--the great secret--and if she suspected it she kept her suspicions to herself. Her chatter was a curious mixture: triumph over the detached Crippses; joy because, after all, "Little Frank" had consented to come with us, to live with us again; and triumph over me because her dreams and presentiments had come true.

"I told you, Hosy," she kept saying. "I told you! I said it would all come out in the end. He wouldn't believe it, Frances. He said I was an old lunatic and--"

"I didn't say anything of the kind," I broke in.

"You said what amounted to that and I don't know as I blame you. But I knew--I just KNEW he and I had been 'sent' on this course and that we--all three of us--would make the right port in the end. And we have--we have, haven't we, Frances?"

"Yes," said Frances, simply. "We have, Auntie--"

"There! do you hear that, Hosy? Isn't it good to hear her call me 'Auntie' again! Now I'm satisfied; or"--with a momentary hesitation--"pretty nearly satisfied, anyway."

"Oh, then you're not quite satisfied, after all," I observed. "What more do you want?"

"I want just one thing more; just one, that's all."

I believed I know what that one thing was, but I asked her. She shot a look at me, a look of indignant meaning.

"Never mind," she said, decidedly. "That's my affair. Oh, Ho!" with a reminiscent chuckle, "how that Cripps woman did glare at me when I said 'twas pretty risky her callin' the Almighty's attention to their doin's.

I hope it did her good. Maybe she'll think of it next time she goes to chapel. But I suppose she won't. All such folks care for is money. They wouldn't be so anxious to get to Heaven if they hadn't read about the golden streets."

That evening, at the hotel, Frances told us her story, the story of which we had guessed a good deal, but of which she had told so little--how, after her father's death, she had gone to live with the Crippses because, as she thought, they wished her to do so from motives of generosity and kindness.

"They are not really relatives of mine," she said. "I am glad of that.

Mrs. Cripps married a cousin of my father's; he died and then she married Mr. Cripps. After Father's death they wrote me a very kind letter, or I thought it kind at the time. They said all sorts of kindly things, they offered me a home, they said I should be like their own daughter. So, having nowhere else to go, I went to them. I lived there nearly two years. Oh, what a life it was! They are very churchly people, they call themselves religious, but I don't. They pretend to be--perhaps they think they are--good, very good. But they aren't--they aren't. They are hard and cruel. Mr. Cripps owns several tenements where poor people live. I have heard things from those people that--Oh, I can't tell you!

I ran away because I had learned what they really were."

Hephzy nodded. "What I can't understand," she said, "is why they offered you a home in the first place. It was because they thought you had money comin' to you, that's plain enough now; but how did they know?"