After a while Mrs. Smiley, the widow who conducted this little boarding-house, who was a cousin of Hetty and whom Barry had known years ago, came in.  She was a tall, angular blonde, cheerlessly resigned to a cheerless existence.  With her came a keen-faced, freckled boy of fourteen or fifteen, with his finger still marking a place in the book he had been reading aloud.

Hetty and her mother were out, it appeared.  Mrs. Smiley didn’t think they would be back to dinner; in fact, she reiterated nervously, she was sure they wouldn’t.  She was extremely and maddeningly non-committal.  No, she didn’t know why they wanted to sell the Mission Street flats.  She had warned them it was a silly thing to bother Barry about it.  No, she didn’t know when he could see them tomorrow; she guessed, almost any time.

Barry went away full of uneasy suspicions, and more than ever convinced that something was wrong.  He went back again the next morning, but nobody but the Japanese boy appeared to be at home.  But a visit in the late afternoon was more successful, for he found Mrs. Smiley and the tall son again.

“Hetty is here, isn’t she?” he burst out suddenly, in the middle of a meaningless conversation.  Mrs. Smiley turned pale and tried to laugh.

“Where else would she be?” she demanded, and she went back to her interrupted dissertation upon the unpleasantness of several specified boarders then under her roof.

“It is funny,” Barry mused.  “What did she say when she went out?”

“Why—­” Mrs. Smiley began uncomfortably, “But, my gracious, I wish you would ask Aunt Ide, Barry!” she interrupted herself uncomfortably.  “She’ll tell you.  She’s the one to ask.”  Aunt Ide was Mrs. Scott.

“Tell me what?” he persisted.  “You tell me, Lulu; that’s a dear.”

“Auntie ’ll tell you,” she repeated, adding suddenly, to the boy, “Russy, wasn’t Aunt Ide in her room when you went up?  You run up and see.”

“Nome,” said Russell positively; but nevertheless he went.

“Nice kid, Lulu,” said Barry in his idle way, “but he looks thin.”

“He’s the finest little feller God ever sent a woman,” the mother answered with sudden passionate pride.  Color leaped to her sallow cheeks.  “But this house is no place for him to be cooped up reading all day,” she went on in a worried tone, after a moment, “and I can’t let him run with the boys around here; it’s a regular gang.  I don’t know what I am going to do with him.  ’Tisn’t as if he had a father.”

“He wouldn’t like to come up to me, and get broken on the Mail?” Barry queried in his interested way.  “He’d get lots of fresh air, and he could sleep at my house.  I’ll keep an eye on him, if you say so.”

“Go on the newspaper!  I think he’d go crazy with joy,” his mother said.  Tears came into her faded eyes.  “Barry, you’re real good-hearted to offer it,” she said gratefully.  “Of all things in the world, that’s the one Russ wants to do.  But won’t he be in your way?”