Very grave and sorrowful looked the poor mother; evidently she knew nothing about the compassionate Savior, who was ready and willing to help her bear her burden. Well for her that the young man in whom she trusted leaned on an arm stronger than his own. The mother had one more request to make of him.
"Could you possibly go to see my Tommy?" she asked, with glistening eyes. "If you only could know him, and kind of coax him, he would take a notion to you like enough, and then he would go through fire and water to please you; he's always so when he takes notions, Tommy is."
Theodore promised again, and finally walked with the old lady down the long bewildering store to the very door, and bowed her out, she meantime looking very happy and hopeful.
Being familiar of old with the habits of the Euclid House, Theodore chose next day the hour when he judged that Tommy would be most at leisure, and sought him out. The landlord was a trifle grayer, decidedly more portly, but was in other respects the same smooth-tongued, affable host that he was when Tode Mall ran hither and thither to do his bidding. Theodore attempted nothing with him further than to beg a few minutes' chat with Tommy. He was directed to the identical little room with its patch of red and yellow carpet, upon which he found Tommy seated, mending a hole in his jacket pocket.
"So you're a tailor, are you?" asked Theodore, cheerily, seating himself familiarly on one corner of the little bed, and having a queer feeling come over him that the room belonged to him, and that Tommy was quite out of place sitting on his piece of carpet.
The young tailor looked up and laughed good-humoredly.
"Queer tailor I'd make!" he said, gaily. "Mother, she does them jobs for me generally, but this is a special occasion. I've lost ten cents and a jack-knife to-day, and I reckoned it was time for me to go to work."
"I used to live here," said Theodore, confidentially. "This was my room. I used to have the table in that corner though, and I've always intended to come back here and have a look at the old room, but I never have until this afternoon."
Tommy suspended his work, and took a good long look at his visitor before he asked his next question.
"Be you the chap who made the row about the bottles?"