When Bachelor Billy reached home, Mrs. Maloney was at the door to ask about Ralph.  The man told her what Mrs. Burnham had said, and expressed an earnest hope that the boy would come safely back in the morning.  Then’ he went to his room, started a fire in the grate, and sat down, by it to smoke.

It was already past his customary bed-time, but he could not quite make up his mind to go to bed without Ralph.  It seemed a very lonely and awkward thing for him to do.  They had gone to bed together every night for nearly three years, and it is not easy to break in upon such a habit as that.

So Billy sat by the fire and smoked his pipe and thought about the boy.  He was thoroughly convinced that the child was Robert Burnham’s son, and all of his hopes and plans and ambitions, during these days, were centred in the effort to have Ralph restored his family, and to his rights as a member of that family.  It would be such a fine thing for the boy, he thought.  In the first place, he could have an education.  Bachelor Billy reverenced an education.  To him, it was almost a personality.  He held that, with an education, a man could do anything short of performing miracles; that all possibilities of goodness or greatness that the world holds were open to him.  The very first thing he would choose for Ralph would be an education.  Then the child would have wealth; that, too, would be a great thing for him and, through him, for society.  The poor would be fed, and the homeless would be sheltered.  He was so sure of the boy’s honest heart and moral firmness that he knew wealth would be a blessing to him and not a curse.

And a beautiful home!  Once he had been in Robert Burnham’s house; and, for days thereafter, its richness and beauty and its homelike air had haunted him wherever he went.  Yes, the boy would have a beautiful home.  He looked around on the bare walls and scanty furniture of his own poor dwelling-place as if comparing them with the comforts and luxuries of the Burnham mansion.  The contrast was a sharp one, the change would be great.  But Ralph was so delicate in taste and fancy, so high-minded, so pure-souled, that nothing would be too beautiful for him, no luxury would seem strange, no life would be so exalted that he could not hold himself at its level.  The home that had haunted Bachelor Billy’s fancy was the home for Ralph, and there he should dwell.  But then—­and the thought came suddenly and for the first time into the man’s mind—­when the boy went there to live, he, Billy, would be alone, alone.  He would have no one to chatter brightly to him at the dawn of day, no one to walk with him to their daily tasks at Burnham Breaker, to eat from the same pail with him the dinner that had been prepared for both, to come home with him at night, and fill the bare room in which they lived with light and cheer enough to flood a palace.  Instead of that, every day would be like this day had been, every night would be as dull and lonely as the night now passing.