"Not poor Pattie at all," answered Gertrude sharply. "He was as poor as anything, and his isn't the sort of trade where they ever get much money. Why, here's Mixham! Where's that child's hat? Wake up, Tommy, or Harry, or whatever your name is!"
Jim Adams, as he had promised, had come down to meet Harry, and if he had been asked what sort of a child he was going to look for, he would have pointed to one of a dozen little urchins, playing up and down his own street, and said that boys were all alike.
So, as he was looking for a nondescript boy in knickers and jacket and cap and heavy boots, it was little wonder that he looked in vain among the crowd of travellers who poured out of the big train on the Junction platform, and he was proportionately surprised when a young lady with red-brown hair and a sweet face touched him on the arm.
"Do you happen to be Mr. Jim Adams?" she asked in her soft, pretty voice.
Jim gasped as he looked down at her, and saw the child she was holding by the hand. A child in petticoats, almost a baby it seemed to him, with a little black kilted frock and sailor coat, and a big white hat with a black ribbon, and underneath it, golden curls and the sweetest little face he had ever seen since last he saw his sister Nellie's face!
He knew it in a moment, and his heart went out to the child with an intensity of love that astonished even himself, and an awful sort of choke came into his throat as he stooped and lifted Nellie's child in his arms.
"Hullo! little chap! I'm Uncle Jim," he said.
Harry looked at him approvingly.
"I'm going to live along with you!" he said. "Mother's gone away," he added mournfully.
The clasp of Jim's arms tightened on the little fellow.