She gasped in pain, the poor child. But when my arms relaxed, she lay sobbing happily against my heart.
Randolph was so scandalized that he sullenly turned his back upon us. Andrews was watching us with discreet and sober interest.
"My dearest child!" I whispered, still in a sort of trance of ecstasy, and Alicia, with the tears trickling down her face, murmured softly.
"Oh, how glad I am I’m found! And there’s Randolph," she added with a happy laugh.
Her last words suddenly woke me out of my trance. I loosed my arms and stood for an instant baffled, uncertain, shamefaced.
"What are you doing here?" I then brusquely demanded with stupid severity to conceal the turbulent emotions within me.
"I—oh, didn’t you get my letter?" she faltered. "I tried to explain—I had nowhere to go—" her lips were quivering—"he told me what a burden I was—I seemed to be only making a lot of trouble—and I had nowhere to go," she wept.
"No, no!—Mr. Pendleton," she was sobbing again.
"Ah, of course, Pendleton." I felt myself turning livid with hate for the man whose purpose in life seemed to be to wreck my own.
"And did Andrews know you were my—my ward?"
"Oh, no, Uncle Ranny," and her voice was like a child’s tired of crying. "I meant to tell him later—after I told you. He just took me without—anything."
Glancing now toward Andrews, I found him discreetly standing, still in the middle of his shop, but somehow he had managed to draw my scandalized nephew into conversation to afford me the courtesy of a greater privacy. My heart went out to him in affection as never before.
"Andrews!" I called, pulling myself together to a semblance of dignity. Andrews gave a nod to Randolph and without any unseemly haste approached me, pleasantly smiling.
"This is my ward—Miss Alicia Palmer," I managed to say with forced calmness.
Andrews bowed ceremoniously as though he were meeting the owner of the Huth library or Bernard Quaritch. Yet there was a curious twinkle in his shrewd old Scotch eyes.
"Like all young women of the present day," I went on, with astonishing glibness—that is at its best when a man is lying for a woman—"she wanted to prove her independence by scorning my poor protection, Andrews—to earn her own living—you understand, Andrews?"