Mrs. Smith sat down in the corner of the room and cried piteously as she took in the deep pathos of this reunion. She had begun to soften toward her husband, accepting his sin upon her own shoulders; and thus sat condemned before the family he had so grievously afflicted. The boy James saw this, and went up to her, wiping away the tears from his radiant eyes. “Oh, what should we have done if you had not been our friend?” he said; “poor mother would have been there all alone with me; but you did not forget us.” “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy! You will never want to live with us again,” said the good woman. “Won’t I though!” answered the boy, eagerly. “For a time,” interposed Mr. Ross; “so long as he works for any one, Mrs. Smith; but we must put him to school and through the City College. Don’t you think so, madam?” “What me, _me_! You don’t mean it, Mr. Ross?” “But I do mean it.” “Eva, Ruth, mother! do you hear that? Hurra! This morning I was in a prison-cell that seemed dug out of a rock; and now—now I’m going to college! Why don’t you stop crying and say Hurra! every one of you, Hurra!” CHAPTER LXII. THE MORTGAGE. A master will had been at work and removed all the principal reasons that kept Eva Laurence in the old home at the cottage. James had never been permitted to return to his work at Smith’s grocery, though that repentant man would gladly have appeased his conscience and the wrathful compunctions of his wife, by giving him the position so summarily vacated by Boyce. This arrangement Mr. Ross had frustrated, by placing James, after a short examination, in the entering class of the City Academy, when his business education commenced, while Boyce, with his aristocratic brother, made a quick passage through the Court of Sessions. This precious pair of worthies were already commencing a sojourn of three years each at Sing Sing, to the infinite disgust of Miss Ellen Post, and the profound grief of the poor wife. This ill-used woman, in the first fire of jealousy, and in the blindness of perfect ignorance, had denounced the two men, in a vague hope that the court would have power to bring her husband back into the bosom of her family a better and kinder man. How keenly she had been disappointed, and how many bitter tears she shed over her helpless babe, no one but the unhappy drudge herself could tell.