"Probably the years since we met have made a greater change in me than in you. You both look exactly as you did that last day I saw you at the harvesting."
"Hey? Which? When? I can't place you, no how. I ain't acquainted with ary sailor, so far forth as I remember."
"But Gaspar, Father Abel? Surely, you and Mercy remember Gaspar Keith, whom you sheltered for so many years, and who treated you so badly at the end?"
"Glory! It ain't! My soul, my soul! Why, Gaspar--_Gaspar!_ If it's you, I'm an old man. Why, you was only a stripling, and now----"
"Now, I'm a man, too. That's all. We all have to grow up and mature. I feel older than you look. And Mercy, the years have certainly used you well. It is good, indeed, to see your faces here, where I looked for strangers only."
"Them's us, lad. Them's us. _We're_ the strangers in these parts. Just struck Chicago this very day. Got stuck in the mud, and had to be fished out like a couple of clams. And who do you think done the fishing? Though, if you hadn't spoke that odd way just now, I'd have thought you would have known first off. Who do you suppose?"
"Oh, he'll never guess. A man is always so slow," interrupted Mercy, eagerly. "Well, 'twas nobody but our own little Kit! The Sun Maid, and looking more like a child of the sunshine even than when you run off with her so long ago."
Gaspar's face had paled at the mention of the Sun Maid to such a grayness beneath its brown that Mercy reached her hand to stay him from falling; but at his second question her womanly intuition told her something of the truth.
"Yes, Gaspar, boy. Your Kitty, and ours. We hadn't seen her till to-day, neither; not since that harvestin'. But the longing got too strong and, when we was burnt out, we came straight for her. Didn't you know she was here yet? Or didn't you know she was still alive?"
"No. No, I didn't. That very next winter after I went away--and that was the next day after we came here together--an Indian passed where I was hunting with my master and told me she had died. He was one we had known at Muck-otey-pokee--the White Pelican. He said a scourge of smallpox had swept the Fort and this settlement and that my little maid had passed out of the world forever. But you tell me--_she is alive_? After all these years of sorrow for her, she is still alive? I--it is hard to believe it."