“So, you young fool, I have found you!” she said, harshly.

Ruth and Spurlock separated, the one embarrassed, the other utterly dumfounded.

“Auntie?” he cried.

“Yes, Auntie!  And to date you have cost me precisely sixteen thousand dollars—­hard earned, every one of them.”

Spurlock wondered if something hadn’t suddenly gone awry in his head.  He had just passed through a terrific physical test.  Surely he was imagining this picture.  His aunt, here at McClintock’s?  It was unbelievable.  He righted a chair and sat in it, his face in his hands.  But when he looked again, there she was!

“I don’t understand,” he said, finally.

“You will before I’m done with you.  I have come to take you home; and hereafter my word will be the law.  You will obey me out of common decency.  You can scribble if you want to, but after you’ve given your eight hours daily to the mills.  Sixteen thousand!  Mark me, young man, you’ll pay it back through the nose, every dollar of it!”

“I owe you nothing.”  Pain was stabbing him, now here, now there; pain was real enough; but he could not establish as a fact in his throbbing brain the presence of his aunt in the doorway.  “I owe you nothing,” he repeated, dully.

“Hoity-toity!  You owe me sixteen thousand dollars.  They were very nice about it, in memory of your father.  They telephoned that you had absconded with ten thousand, and that if I would make good the loss within twenty-four hours, they would not prosecute.  I sent my check for ten thousand; and it has cost me six thousand to find you.  I should say that you owed me considerable.”

Still his brain refused to assimilate the news or to deduce the tremendous importance of it.

“You are Ruth?”

“Yes,” said Ruth, stirred by anger and bitterness and astonishment.  This, then, was the woman from whom Hoddy would not have accepted a cup of water.

“Come here,” said the petticoated tyrant.  Ruth obeyed, not willingly, but because there was something hypnotic in the authoritative tone.  “Put your arms about me.”  Ruth did so, but without any particular fervour.  “Kiss me.”  Ruth slightly brushed the withered cheek.  The aunt laughed.  “Love me, love my dog!  Because I’ve scolded him and told him a few truths, you are ice to me.  Not afraid of me, either.”

“No,” said Ruth, pulling back.

But the aunt seized her in her arms and rocked with her.  “A miserly old woman.  Well, I’ve had to be.  All my life I’ve had to fight human wolves to hold what I have.  So I’ve grown hard—­outside.  What’s all this about, anyhow?  You.  Far away there was the one woman for this boy of mine—­some human being who would understand the dear fool better than all the rest of the world.  But God did not put you next door.  He decided that Hoddy should pay a colossal price for the Dawn Pearl—­shame, loneliness, torment, for only through these agencies would he learn your worth.  The fibre of his soul had to be tested, queerly, to make him worthy of you.  Through fire and water, through penury and pestilence, your hand will always be on his shoulder.  McClintock wrote me about you; but all I needed was the sight of your face as it was a moment gone.”