And then Miss Bailey understood. She had heard of certain stranded waifs left high and dry when the ebb of Christianity receded before the flood of Judaism, and New York's great East Side, once a fashionable district, then claimed by a thrifty Irish element, became a Ghetto. It was the Jewish Sabbatical Law which gave the derelicts an opportunity to earn a few pennies every Saturday, for no orthodox Jew may kindle fire on the Sabbath. And no frugal Jew, even in the impossible circumstance of being able to afford it, will keep the stove alight all through Friday night. Hence he employs a Christian to do the work he would not stoop to. And this was the occupation of that amazing new boy! Miss Bailey clearly saw the path of her duty, and it led her, the lighter of fires in tow, straight to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. For some days, however, this path was closed to her conscientious feet. The boy was lost again, and Miss Bailey, who took the welfare of her charges very much to heart, was seriously distressed and uneasy. The First Readers were enlisted as a corps of detectives, but though they prowled in likely and unlikely spots, they brought no news of the stranger. A week went by. The Principal, the Truant Officer, Patrick Brennan's father, were all informed and enlisted in the quest. But day followed day empty of news. Mr. Eissler could offer no suggestion, though he promised that if the child should reappear he would make further and more patient efforts to elicit some information from him. And then quite casually one afternoon Sergeant Brennan appeared in Room 18, with a bundle of rags under his arm. "Here he is for you, Miss," he announced, waving away her acknowledgments with a stout blue arm before he removed his helmet and dried his heated brow. "I seen him several times since you spoke about him, but never run him down until now." Again the child was thinner, and his likeness to a hunted animal was clearer, more heart-breaking. "And how should he be otherwise?" reflected Constance Bailey as she realized that, partly through her bidding, he actually had been persistently hunted throughout the past weeks. After three o'clock when the First Readers, including the loudly objecting Board of Monitors, had been sent home, Miss Bailey secured every exit save the door into the hall, established the new boy in one of the front row of seats, locked the hall door upon her own retreat, and sought Mr. Eissler.