Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/329

 “But it is, Mother,” cried the young man.

“What awful apparel!” said Mrs. Smith-Jones after she had embraced her son. Then her eyes wandered to Nadara, who had been standing in demure silence just within the doorway.

“You?” she gasped. “You are not dead?”

Nadara shook her head, and Waldo Emerson hastened to recount her adventures since Stark’s attack upon her on the deck of the Priscilla. Mrs. Smith-Jones approached the girl. She placed a hand upon her shoulder.

“I have been doing a great deal of thinking since last I saw you,” she said, “and the result of it is that I am going to do something that I have never before done in my life—I am going to ask your pardon; I treated you shamefully. I do not need to ask if my son loves you—you have already told me that you love him—and his eyes have told me where his heart lies.

“For long nights I lay awake thinking of the horror of it, and almost praying that he might be dead rather than come back to find you waiting for him in Boston—that was before you went overboard. You had no birth or family, and that to me meant everything; but since I thought that you were both dead I discovered that I recalled many things about you that were infinitely to be preferred over birth and breeding.