My mother was crying, from gladness I took it, for there certainly was joy in her eyes when she held me off and looked down at me. Then came astonishment, and she lowered her spectacles from the top of her head to make sure that she saw aright. "But who--who is this?" she said. For answer I took Penelope's hand and faced the whole company; faced Mr. Pound and the squire, old Mr. Smiley and Miss Spinner, Mrs. Pound, and a score of others of the great folk of the valley. I faced them with defiance in my eyes, for were not they the authors of the Professor's troubles and was I not his only friend? "It's Penelope Blight," I said, "and I promised the Professor to take care of her." "What?" cried Mr. Pound. "The Professor's daughter--the man who almost killed Constable Lukens? Dav-id!" "Yes, sir," I said. Penelope's hand was tightening in mine, and I glanced to my side, to see her standing very straight, and the blue ribbon was tilted as proudly as on that morning when we met by the mountain brook. "Dav-id!" cried my mother. "Yes, sir," I said, looking right at Mr. Pound. "I promised the Professor that I would take care of her--always." CHAPTER VI It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of my essentiality to their happiness. My mother had long been haunted by a conviction that I should meet an early death by drowning or an accidental gunshot, and this very morning she had awakened from a dream in which she saw her only child floating on the murky waters of the mill-dam. Rushing to my room and finding me gone, she had had her worst fears confirmed, and at the moment of my reappearance Mr. Pound was endeavoring to console her for her loss and to bring her to a state of Christian resignation. So all was forgotten in the joy of my unexpected return, and though in the eyes of the minister, Miss Spinner, and the others I was just a small black sheep about whose absence an unnecessary pother had been raised, there was only rejoicing in the home fold. Even my father did not humiliate me with forgiveness, but took me in his arms silently and held me there, as he might have held me had he just rescued me from the depths of the mill-dam. To follow such a greeting with chastisement, however well merited, was quite out of the question. In the seclusion of my own room I did meet with gentle chiding for the anguish I had caused, but my mother remembered her dream, and my father his hours of futile searching, and I knew that the hands which pressed mine would not be raised against me in harsh reproof. Below us, I was sure, ears were strained to hear some real evidence that I was receiving my deserts, for there was a silence there like that outside of the prison wall when the crowd waits for the doleful tidings tolled by the prison bell. Perhaps the listeners were disappointed. I remember that Mr. Pound looked rather nonplussed as