The boy saw Harry carried to his mother’s house, saw a man hurry by to call Mrs. Haddon, and waited for some time after she arrived, hidden in a gutter near at hand, listening for every word.  After about a quarter of an hour Pete Holden drove his trap to the door, and Dick heard them talking of the hospital and Yarraman; then he knew that Harry was not dead, and dragged his worn, aching limbs to his own home, stupefied with suffering, hunger, and fatigue.

When Mrs. Haddon entered her kitchen an hour later, carrying a flaming match in her fingers, she was shocked to see a small, yellow-clad figure crouched in her own particular armchair near the chimney, and surmounting it a small white face in which burned two astonishing eyes.  The little widow screamed and dropped the light and then screamed again, but a feeble voice reassured her.

‘Richard Haddon, is that you?’ she said severely.  ’Oh! you wicked, bad, vicious boy!  Where have you been?  What’ve you been doing?’

She was busying herself preparing the lamp, and her tongue ran on.

‘You’re breakin’ your poor mother’s heart—­breakin’ my heart with your bushrangin’ an’ villainy, bringin’ down the police, an’ trouble, an’ sorrow on me.’

The little woman’s nerves had been sorely tried of late with her own troubles and her neighbours’, and she broke down now and wept.

‘An’ you don’t care,’ she sobbed, ’you don’t care a bit how I suffer!

Now the lamp was lit, and the widow turned her streaming eyes upon her incorrigible young son, and instantly her whole expression changed.  She forgot to weep, she ceased to complain; she gazed at Dick and her bosom was charged with terror, pity, and remorse.  Truly he was a pitiful and ghostly object, sitting there in his mud, looking very small and pinched, with unaccustomed hollows in his pale cheeks, and here and there a nasty bloodstain showing brightly against the yellow clay.

‘Dick!’ screamed Mrs. Haddon.

The next moment he lay in his mother’s arms, clinging to her with tenacious fingers, crying hysterically, utterly unlike the Dick she thought she knew so well; and she kissed him, and wept over him, and murmured to him as if he were really a baby again.  She ascribed all to terror aroused by the knowledge that the police were after him.  He had covered himself with slurry in strange hiding-places, and had had a fall probably or a blow.  He was fed, his clothes were put in water, and finally he fell asleep in his own bed with his mother sitting by his side, her hand clasped in his.  If Dick had been told a week earlier that he would ever go to sleep clinging to his mother’s hand, he would have scouted the idea with indignation and scorn; and he remembered the act later with a blush as something shamefully effeminate or infantile, betraying a weakness in his character hitherto quite unsuspected.

CHAPTER XVI.