"Jim?" she said, and the light of joy and understanding came into the yearning eyes. She nodded ever so feebly, and the hand that rested in her friend's twitched and trembled in the effort to grasp hers. "I will find him. It is all right. Now, you be quite happy. I will bring him here." The white face settled back on the pillow, and the weary eyes closed with a little sigh of contentment very strange in that place. When the visitor passed her cot ten minutes later, she was asleep, with a smile on her lips. It proved not so easy a matter to find Jim. We came upon his track in his old haunts after a while, only to lose it again and again. It was clear that he was around, but it seemed almost as if he were purposely dodging us; and in fact that proved to have been the case when at last, after a hunt of weary days and nights through the neighborhood, he was brought in. Ragged, pale, and pinched by hunger, we saw him with a shock of remorse for having let him drift so long. His story was simple enough. When his mother failed to come back, and, the rent coming due, the door of what had been home to him, even such as it was, was closed upon him, he took to the street. He slept in hallways and with the gang among the docks, never going far from the "village" lest he should miss news of his mother coming back. The cold nights came, and he shivered often in his burrows; but he never relaxed his watch. All the time his mother lay dying less than half a dozen blocks away, but there was no one to tell him. Had any one done so, it is not likely that the guard would have let him through the gate, as he looked. Seven weeks he had spent in the streets when he heard that he was wanted. The other boys told him that it was the "cruelty" man sure; and then began the game of hide-and-seek that tried our patience and wore on his mother, sinking rapidly now, but that eventually turned up Jim. [Illustration: "'Oh, mother! You were gone so long!'"] We took him up to the hospital, and into the ward where his mother lay. Away off at the farther end of the room, he knew her, the last in the row, and ran straight to her before we could stop him, and fell on her neck. "Mother!" we heard him say, while he hugged her, with his head on her pillow. "Mother, why don't you speak to me? I am all right--I am." He raised his head and looked at her. Happy tears ran down the thin face turned to his. He took her in his arms again. "I am all right, mother; honest, I am. Don't you cry. I couldn't keep the rooms, mother! They took everything, only the deed to father's grave. I kept that." He dug in the pocket of his old jacket, and brought out a piece of paper, carefully wrapped in many layers of rags and newspaper that hung in dirty tatters. "Here it is. Everything else is gone. But it is all right. I've got you, and I am here. Oh, mother! You were gone so long!"