And Mme Beteta, too, had held his band as he said "Good-bye," and said, with much feeling, "I would have been glad if you had got into some mischief so that I might have had the pleasure of helping you. I will hope all the time to see you come back alive and whole." "You are all too good to me," laughed Jim, overcome by the kindness he was everywhere meeting with. "I feel as if I was getting more than my proper share. If Jack had been here now, you'd have thought ever so much more of him." "Perhaps!" smiled madame. "We will see when you both come back," He was hurrying back to his quarters, bent on getting a good night's sleep if possible, since the coming nights on board ship might be less conducive thereto, when, as he swung round a corner where a gas lamp hung, deep in his own thoughts and with his head bent down, a timid hand fell on his arm, and as he hastily shook it off, a soft voice jerked: "Jim!" He whirled round in vast amazement, and got a shock. "Kattie! . . . oh, _Kattie!_" "I did so want to see you before you went. I only heard to-day----" She looked so pretty in the fluttering light of the lamp, so touchingly soft and sweet, like some beautiful wild bird drawn to a possibly hostile hand by stress of need and prepared for instant flight. She was very nicely dressed too, better than he had ever seen her before, in well-fitting dark clothes and a little fur pork-pie hat, like the one Gracie used to wear in the winter. And under it her eyes shone brightly and her face glowed and quivered with many emotions. The passers-by were beginning to notice and look back at them. He led her into a quieter side-street where there was almost no traffic. "But what are you doing here, Kattie? We have been searching for you for a month past, and now----" "I couldn't help it, Jim. I had to come----" "But why, Kattie? Why? Do you know what you've done by running away like that?" And he could not keep the feeling out of his voice, as he thought of poor old Seth, and her mother, and the broken home. "Your mother is dead. It killed her." Kattie's hands were over her face and she was sobbing. "And your father came to London to look for you, and got run over. His hand was in mine as he died, and his last words were for you, 'Tell her to come home!' he said, and then he died." The slender figure shook with sobs. Perhaps he had been too brutal to blurt it out like that. He ought to have broken it to her by degrees. "Oh, why did you do it, Kattie?" he said, more gently. And Kattie, shaken out of herself by his news and his manner, sobbed out her secret. "Jim, Jim, don't be so hard to me! It was for you, you, you----" "_Kattie_," he cried, aghast. "Yes," she choked on in a passion of surrender and self-revelation. "It was you I wanted--you--always. And I thought if I could only get to London where you were----"