Mrs. Martin said she really wanted him, and Mrs. Turner, stepping out on the kitchen porch, called out, “Jim, Jim!”
There was no answer, but pretty soon a boy walked across the yard toward the house, and stopped near the porch.
He was a boy about twelve years old, tall of his age and rather thin, and with a round, honest face, which looked very pleasant when he was happy, but which was at that moment very much clouded.
“I’ll speak to him by myself, if you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Martin, shutting the door and seating herself on the porch step.
“Come here, my boy,” said she kindly, while her homely face looked almost beautiful with goodness. “I don’t believe you are a bad boy; I think it’s all a mistake, and it will come out all right some day. I am going to take you home with me, if you will come.”
Jim’s brown eyes brightened, but he answered, not very gratefully, “Thank you, but I’d better go away from here—they all believe I took it.”
“No, they don’t; I don’t for one. You had better stay and behave like a good, honest lad, and I’ll be a true friend to you. Besides, we mustn’t run away from our troubles! you know they are sent to make us good and strong, don’t you see, my boy?”
Having finished her little sermon, Mrs. Martin got up and gave Jim a motherly hug and a kiss. And poor Jim “broke down” as he would have called it. But it was a breaking down that did him a world of good, and made a new boy of him.
“There, there,” said Mrs. Martin, “now go and get your things, and we will go home.”
Jim went up-stairs quietly to the little attic room that had been his own for two years. He made a small bundle of his old clothes. He wouldn’t take the new ones. “They was my friends when they got them for me,” he said to himself, “but now they ain’t my friends any more, and them clothes don’t belong to me now.”