t was not home, to be sure; but there was the
little room over the kitchen where he might sleep, and there was the
kind woman who smiled at him sometimes with the sad, far-away look in
her eyes that somehow hurt. He would not like, now, to leave her--with
daddy gone.

There were the gold-pieces, too; and concerning these David was equally
puzzled. What should he do with them? He did not need them--the kind
woman was giving him plenty of food, so that he did not have to go to
the store and buy; and there was nothing else, apparently, that he
could use them for. They were heavy, and disagreeable to carry; yet he
did not like to throw them away, nor to let anybody know that he had
them: he had been called a thief just for one little piece, and what
would they say if they knew he had all those others?

David remembered now, suddenly, that his father had said to hide
them--to hide them until he needed them. David was relieved at once.
Why had he not thought of it before? He knew just the place, too,--the
little cupboard behind the chimney there in this very room! And with a
satisfied sigh, David got to his feet, gathered all the little yellow
disks from his pockets, and tucked them well out of sight behind the
piles of books on the cupboard shelves. There, too, he hid the watch;
but the little miniature of the angel-mother he slipped back into one
of his pockets.

David's second morning at the farmhouse was not unlike the first,
except that this time, when Simeon Holly asked him to fill the woodbox,
David resolutely ignored every enticing bug and butterfly, and kept
rigorously to the task before him until it was done.

He was in the kitchen when, just before dinner, Perry Larson came into
the room with a worried frown on his face.

"Mis' Holly, would ye mind just steppin' to the side door? There's a
woman an' a little boy there, an' somethin' ails 'em. She can't talk
English, an' I'm blest if I can make head nor tail out of the lingo she
DOES talk. But maybe you can."

"Why, Perry, I don't know--" began Mrs. Holly. But she turned at once
toward the door.

On the porch steps stood a very pretty, but frightened-looking young
woman with a boy perhaps ten years old at her side. Upon catching sight
of Mrs. Holly she burst into a torrent of unintelligible words,
supplemented by numerous and vehement gestures.

Mrs. Holly shrank back, and cast appealing eyes toward her husband who
at that moment had come across the yard f