“Cobbler” Horn sighed. But perhaps it was better that the young girl had withdrawn. There was little room for doubt; but he must make assurance doubly sure. He touched the electric bell at the head of the bed, and the nurse immediately appeared.
“Will you be so good as to tell Miss Horn I should like to see her at once.”
The nurse, marking the eagerness with which the request was uttered, and observing the little shoe on the counterpane, perceived that the occasion was urgent, and departed on her errand with all speed.
“I don’t think he is any worse this morning,” she said to Miss Jemima when she had delivered her message. “Indeed he seems, quite unaccountably, to be very much better. But it is evident something has happened.”
Without waiting to hear more, Miss Jemima hurried to her brother’s room. Sitting up in bed, with a happy face, he was holding in his hand a dilapidated child’s shoe, which he placed in his sister’s hands as soon as she approached the bed.
“Jemima, look at that!” he said joyously.
Thinking it was the shoe which her brother had always preserved with so much care, she took it, and examined it with much concern.
“Whoever can have cut it about like that?” she cried.
“Cobbler” Horn hastened to rectify her mistake.
“No, Jemima,” he said, in a tone of reverent exultation; “it’s the other shoe—the one we’ve been wanting to find all these years!”