Just as I had brought him to this pass, the bell rang, and I sprang to the dining-room door. The dining-room was the front basement, and the outside door was so near that I opened it myself. It was, indeed, my vagrant.
“I want Miss May,” he said, with the air which such a gamin puts on when he speaks to a servant,—an air which instantly subdued itself into propriety when he heard my voice.
I took him in to Tom; and I saw the blue eyes softened even the prejudiced mind and worldly heart of Mr. Thomas May. He spoke very kindly to the boy, and then sent him into the kitchen for his supper.
“Where do you propose to keep this new acquisition?” he asked me, after the blue-eyed was out of sight.
“In this house, if you please. There is a little single bed all ready for him in the attic, and I’ve arranged with cook to give him a bath and then put him into some of the clothes her own boy left behind him when he went away to sea. I mean to rescue this one soul from a starved and miserable and wicked life, and I’m willing to take some pains; and if you aren’t willing to do your part I’m ashamed of you.”
Tom laughed, and called me his “fierce little woman,” his “angry turtle-dove,” and half-a-dozen other names which he never gave me except when he was in good humor, so I knew it was all right.
Before three days were over Tom owned that my vagrant, as he persisted in calling the boy (though we knew now that his name was Johnny True), was the best errand boy he had ever employed. I myself taught him to read, as I had promised, and brighter scholar never teacher had. In four months he had progressed so fast that he could read almost any thing. There had been a sort of feverish eagerness in his desire to learn for which I was at a loss to account. Sometimes, coming home from some party or opera, I would find him studying in the kitchen at midnight.
We grew fond of him, all of us. Cook said he was no trouble, and he made it seem as if she had her own boy back again. He waited on Tom with a sort of dog-like faithfulness; and, as for me, I believe that he would have cut his hand off for me at any time.
Yet one morning he got up and deliberately walked out of the house. When his breakfast was ready cook called for him in vain, and in vain she searched for him from attic to cellar. But before it was time for Tom to go to business another boy came, a little older than my vagrant,—a nice, respectable-looking boy,—and asked for Mr. May. He came into the dining-room and stood there, cap in hand.