It was like music in the boy’s heart; he lifted his head with a light shining in his tear-blurred eyes. “Well, I never,” ejaculated Mrs. Evans. The boy held his knife and fork with a grace her husband had not acquired, taking his food as slowly and daintily as a girl. “Those Tucker men, that old Chris and Sam have no claim on you, and they haven’t done as well by you as they promised they would when they took you, a little fellow, out of the Christie Home. I’ve often spoken to Mr. Evans about it, but he’s so easy going I might as well have talked to the wind. I told our new minister that he must ‘high-way and hedge’ you; he has noticed you; but he is feeling his way among the people, and couldn’t make a stir as soon as he came.” “Is _that_ where I was?” asked astonished Joe. “I thought I used to be somewhere. _They_ never told me. I seem to remember things that happened before I can remember. They told me that I hadn’t any father or mother, and wouldn’t have any home if they had not taken me in.” “People thought you ought to be sent to school and Sunday-school, but what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. I’m glad enough you have left them, but you should have told them you wanted to leave.” “It wouldn’t have done any good,” he muttered “they wouldn’t have said anything.” “Now, I’ll put out the cat, and leave the table standing, and bolt the shed door, and lock the front door, and put on my things, and we’ll be off. Nettie is fast asleep and will never miss me.” “I will wash the dishes for you; we put them under the pump, then wipe them on anything.” “That wouldn’t suit me, thank you,” laughed Mrs. Evans; “you can hoe corn better than wipe dishes, and Mr. Brush has acres and acres of corn to hoe, and potatoes too: he’s making that old Sparrow farm pay.” Joe did not know that he had been lost, but he began to feel very much found. “I’m glad you went out to the well with that glass,” he said, as his hostess wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and tied the blue ribbons of a blue wool hood under her chin. “I’m usually glad of kind things I do; I suppose that’s one reason I do them.” Joe unlatched the gate, holding it open for her to pass through, then pushed it shut; Beauty and this woman seemed to belong to the same order of creaturehood; the woman’s eyes were like Beauty’s, soft, and big and brown, and _they answered you_. She took his hand and drew it under her arm in a sort of comradeship, and then they went on, the woman and the boy, to find the gate that would swing open into a world of which it had never entered the boy’s heart to dream. The gate was shut and a man in shirt-sleeves with a pipe in his mouth was standing on the mysterious and happy side of it resting his elbows on the pickets, and, attracted by voices, looking up the road in the starlight towards the two figures. “You stay here, Joe—that’s Mr. Brush. I’ll tell him all your story.” “My story?” repeated Joe, in amazement.