He rode with speed now because of his eagerness to get back home and look up Thad, upon whom he meant to let loose a bombshell that must fairly stagger him.
It was not yet nine o'clock, and ten was the appointed hour when they were expected to join the picnic party.

Hugh believed he had never in all his life felt one-half so joyous.

If a fortune had come his way he could not have appreciated it as much as he did the knowledge that Matilda and Andrew were going to reap the reward of their long life of tender-heartedness in their relations with their fellows.

It was simply grand, and Hugh felt that his mother must know all about it as soon as the affair had developed to the grand finale and Matilda's eyes were opened to the fact that she had all this while been entertaining an angel unawares.
Thad was at home and up to his eyes in rewinding a fishing-rod that needed attention.

When Hugh burst in upon him with such a glow in his face and a light in his eyes, Thad knew that something bordering on the wonderful must have occurred.
Singular to say, his first remark was pretty near a bull's-eye, showing that he must have been thinking about the ex-hobo as he wound the waxed red silk around the guides of his fishing-rod.
"What's happened, Hugh?
Oh! have you found a way we can get rid of that sticker of a Brother Lu?
Something seems to whisper to me you've struck a scheme.