ike rats if I hear of it,' said I.

While we were conversing my father arrived. Eveleen, not knowing him,
would have had me accept the friendly covering of a mat.

'Here 's a big one! he's a clergyman,' she muttered to herself, and ran
to him and set up a gipsy whine, fronting me up to the last step while
she advanced; she only yielded ground to my outcry.

My father bent over me. Kiomi had prepared him for what he saw. I
quieted his alarm by talking currently and easily. Julia Bulsted had
despatched a messenger to inform him of my mysterious disappearance; but
he, as his way was, revelling in large conjectures, had half imagined
me seized by a gust of passion, and bound for Germany. 'Without my
luggage?' I laughed.

'Ay, without your luggage, Richie,' he answered seriously. His conceit
of a better knowledge of me than others possessed, had buoyed him
up. 'For I knew,' he said, 'we two do nothing like the herd of men. I
thought you were off to her, my boy. Now!' he looked at me, and this
look of dismay was a perfect mirror. I was not a presentable object.

He stretched his limbs on the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking
and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body
as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. Eveleen hung near.

'These people have been kind to you?' he said.

'No, the biggest brutes on the earth,' said I.

'Oh! you say that, when I spotted you out in the dark where you might
have lied to be eaten, and carried you and washed your bloody face,
and watched you, and never slept, I didn't, to mother you and wet your
head!' cried the girl.

My father beckoned to her and thanked her appreciably in the yellow
tongue.

'So these scoundrels of the high road fell upon you and robbed you,
Richie?'

I nodded.

'You let him think they robbed you, and you had your purse to give me a
gold guinea out of it!' Eveleen cried, and finding herself in the wrong
track, volubly resumed: 'That they didn't, for they hadn't time, whether
they meant to, and the night black as a coal, whoever they were.'

The mystery of my not having sent word to Bulsted or to Riversley
perplexed my father.

'Comfortable here!' he echoed me, disconsolately, and glanced at the
heath, the tent, the black circle of the broth-pot, and the wild girl.

CHAPTER XLVII. MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN

Kiomi's mother was seen in a turn of the gravel-cutting, bearing
purchases from Durstan villag