For a moment the two in the kitchen stared at each other, speechless; but the moment was short. Whatever might have caused the sick boy’s departure, Mrs. Schmitz was not one to have her hospitality scorned.

“Never mind what you think,” she sharply reproved Sydney, who had ventured to voice his distrust of the midnight prowler. “I looked once in his face. He iss now a good boy. If he goes once again to cold ant hunger, he——” She broke her speech and called into the night, “Blitzen! Blitzen!”

No dog came bounding to her, but a faint whine was heard somewhere outside. She caught up the rope that had held the stranger, and, heedless of thin slippers, ran into the wet dark, calling Sydney to follow.

They found the dog tied to the fence, his jaws strapped together.

With many endearments of hand and speech, the latter in German, she unbound him, led him to the kitchen door, and made him smell of rope and chair. “Seek! seek! Find him! Hold! him!” she commanded.

The dog sniffed doubtfully a minute, growled, and with a short bark, set off through the gate and down the street.

“You also, Seedney! Run! Catch up mit Blitzen. He’ll find that boy, ant you bring him back. No matter what he says, bring him.”

The run was short and led scarcely a block away to a vacant lot, where Sydney found the other boy prone on his face in a thicket of young sallows and wild blackberry.

Evidently stunned from a fall, he was mumbling incoherently and Blitzen was nosing him doubtfully. Even the dog had his scruples about attacking a fallen enemy. Sydney turned the lad over, trying to learn what had happened, and was debating the next thing to do when Mrs. Schmitz puffed into the zone of excitement.

“Ach! Here he iss! Hooray, Blitzen! Good Blitzen!” She gave the dog a caress that took the drooping doubt from his tail and set it high over his back, a waving plume of satisfaction.

They soon had the stranger on his feet and back in the kitchen. He seemed willing to go, and quite calm but reticent, evidently perplexed as to Mrs. Schmitz’s motive in compelling his return.

She did not hurry him, but busied herself about the room; gave the dog some food, and piled the dishes together, Sydney helping. Presently she turned to the boy, decision in her face. “You come now mit me up stairs ant have one bath ant go to bed. To-morrow you shall talk mit me.”

He stood suddenly erect. “No, tonight—now I shall tell you what—what you must know before you keep me in your home another hour. Before this I have robbed a few ice boxes—taken things to eat. But this time I came to get money, jewels, anything I could find that could be turned into money. I had the dope, too.”

“Dope?” she questioned as he hesitated.

“Yes. I was going to put you to sleep, so that I could have time to—to go over the house. You see I’m green at the work, and Jim—my pal—said that was the only way I could pull off the stunt.”

“Ach! So? Two of you?”

“Yes. He is an old hand.”

“Why did he send you? Why comes he not himself?”

“He said the police were on to him. If I was caught I could get off easy because it was my first offense and I am young. Besides it isn’t safe for the one that—that steals the goods to try to raise money on them.”

“So?” It is impossible to describe in words the changes the German woman could ring on that one little word. It could mean doubt, incredulity, surprise, joy, sorrow, pity, trust, love, and more.

This time it meant scorn. “So? You take all the risk. You give him the goods, ant he gets the money! It iss one fine scheme! When did you fall in his trap?”

“Today—yesterday, I mean,” he glanced at the clock that marked the hour of three, “when I was hunting work, hungrier all the time, I got angry. I said if a man wants work and can’t get it, at least he ought not to starve. Going to jail would save him from that.”

“I’ll give you better to eat than any chails,” Mrs. Schmitz broke in with a laugh.

Sydney saw the ghost of an answering smile on the lad’s face, and knew that was what she wished.

“When I went back to—to the place down by the water front where he hides in the daytime, he made this proposition that—that I tried to carry out—and failed.”

“But why you choose my place? I’m not rich.”

“A man paid you fifty dollars last evening, there in the greenhouse, didn’t he?” She nodded. “I was there, saw it, and hurried off to tell him. We came back in time to look through your dining-room windows and see you at dinner. Gee! It looked good.” He hesitated a breath, and indicating Sydney, went on. “He was feeding the dog things I could have fought for.”

“Seedney, no more shall you feed Blitzen at the table.”

“Something like frenzy came to me then, and I said, ‘I’ll do it! I will have some of that dinner!’”

For a time the kitchen was absolutely still. Then Mrs. Schmitz said abruptly, “Still you tell me not why you run out mit mine bread.”

The boy started up. “Don’t you see? He was hungry too. There I was eating a splendid meal in your kitchen and he was out in the cold. I had forgotten him, a pal that had helped me as long as he had a cent. The noise—our signal—recalled me, made me ashamed, and I—I did—what you saw.”

“But how came you down, hurt, lying mit the scratching vines?”

“He—he was mad. He said I had queered the whole game, and he was through with me. But he would put me to sleep first so I couldn’t tell which way he went.”

Mrs. Schmitz rose. “It iss enough. You come mit me. One good hot bath mit plenty of soap shall wash away the thief, outsides and insides. You sleep one night in my house; to-morrow we talk.” She walked across to the boiler and touched it. “It iss hot. Come!”

Blitzen started up and licked her hand, at which she cast a quick look of distrust at the boy. “Did you tie up mine dog?”

“No. Jim did.”

“Ach! So? He iss a goot dog. Come.” Her face beamed with good feeling as she led the boy off to minister to him as his own mother might have done.

Sydney returned to his room to sleep out the remainder of the night; but sleep did not come quickly. The last thing he heard was Mrs. Schmitz’s cheery “Sleep goot” at the door of the best chamber. And with that up leaped again in Sydney’s heart the demon, jealousy.

The best chamber! There were two others untenanted. In all the months since his coming he had not once questioned the generosity of his hostess because he had the most meanly furnished chamber in the house. Indeed he knew very little of the great rambling structure that had grown like the chambered nautilus, by larger and ever larger additions. It was just as Mrs. Schmitz had bought it. Glimpses through open doors revealed nothing to Sydney’s untrained eyes beyond a succession of beds, rugs or carpets, and chairs. But he did know that the large room over the living room opened upon a spacious, wisteria-hung porch and was called the best chamber; and he resented its possession by the thief.

It was after nine when he opened his eyes on a brilliant morning, the winter sun streaming into the room with the warmth of May. He hopped out and dressed hastily, whistling gayly, his yellow humor quite forgotten till Mrs. Schmitz appeared asking for clean underwear and other articles for the new comer.

“We will give him the best we have, Seedney, till he iss well. Seek people don’t like rags nor dirt.”

Silently and not very readily he selected from his own ample if not elegant wardrobe the pieces she asked. Perhaps it was not strange that he was ungracious. He had fought for his crust and disputed the wall side of a warm grating with others in as desperate case as himself; and that does not breed readiness to welcome newcomers of doubtful character.

Yet Sydney himself was puzzled by this emotion. He had never grudged things before. He had usually been ready to share the crust he fought for. Why could he not feel kinder to this boy, Max? Thoroughly ashamed, he determined to discipline himself.

At the late breakfast the boy told more of himself, yet nothing that revealed his past; and his hostess did not ask it, but pressed the good food on him, as pleased to see him eat as if he had been her own son.

“Already are you better!” she exclaimed, delighted, as they rose from the table. “Not once have you coughed.”

“I’d be ill-bred to disturb such a breakfast with coughing.” He made a little bow and stepped back for her to pass.

Sydney could see that the speech, the bow, everything Max did with such an air of elegance, was quite natural, quite unconsciously done. And in the parlor where every Sunday morning after breakfast Mrs. Schmitz and Sydney sang together, the new boy proved by every word and movement that he had been born to a refinement that Sydney believed beyond his own greatest effort to acquire.

Here as all over the house the furniture was incongruous, though, differing from that in Sydney’s room, it was expensive and modern. But three things stood for culture; the grand piano, a violin in its case, and a mahogany music cabinet filled with music.

“You can sing?” she questioned; “or play the violin?” she added, seeing his glance fixed upon it.

“I haven’t much of a voice, but I used to play a little.”

She crossed the room to take the instrument from its case, but stood motionless for a moment, her back to the boys, her hands hanging limp. When at last she did bring it to view, her hands were trembling. Each touch was a caress; and when she adjusted the bow and placed the violin in position to tune, Sydney heard her sigh.

But when she handed it to Max her face was serene and her voice steady. “Try it. Mine father’s it was; I have many years ago played the piano for him. When he died they sent it to me mit much music ant mine fine dresses I wore in Germany.”

Max took the violin with a reverence that pleased her, and tried the strings with delicate, accustomed fingers. “It is a fine one, a Cremona!” he added with an excitement Sydney saw no reason for; he didn’t know one fiddle from another.

But Mrs. Schmitz did. She knew much about music, instruments, and composers. And here was some one else who could speak the same language, and with his instrument too, as Sydney could see by the way he tuned it and played little snatches of this or that, while she nodded and beamed.

“Ach, goot! Your hant ant head ant heart sind all one mit music!”

From under the shelf of the cabinet she drew a pile of violin music and began to run it over rapidly, pronouncing the foreign names with no more ease than Max, who caught a passage from one, or hummed a snatch from another; and presently they were speaking in German, both excited, gesticulating, happy.

Sydney was as much out of it as if the language were Hindoo. In school he had done well. Through the interest of Mr. Streeter, a young man recently come into a fortune, who devoted it and his time to assisting boys who were otherwise on the way to being “down and out,” and through the kindness of Mrs. Schmitz, Sydney had been able to press on in his grades. Now at the beginning of the winter semester he stood with Billy Bennett, “Sis” Jones, Queen Bess, and all the others who made his world, seniors in the “Fifth Avenue High,” side by side, respected and liked.

But suddenly Sydney realized in the presence of this stranger, so sinisterly introduced into that quiet life, that there was a great area of culture for which no public school can issue diplomas. As a child speaks its native tongue nor knows when he learns it, so Max spoke the language of refined society, of an early home environment that comes only from generations of good breeding and comfortable income.

Sydney’s eyes were opened in another quarter. He had always found kindness and understanding in Mrs. Schmitz, and that exquisite neatness that is the mark of a gentlewoman; but he had not seen behind her eccentricities. It had never occurred to him that the industrious woman who spent her days with pots and flowers had once lived differently. Though her fingers had brought marvelous music from the ivory keys, he had not seen far beyond the split nails—marks of her toil.

Now he saw! And he suddenly knew she had met a kindred spirit.

“Come, Seedney,” she called half an hour later; “we’ll sing now our songs.”

If she had not gone and taken his hand he would not have stirred, so foreign to them did he feel. But she must have divined that, for she pulled him forward, and not without pride in her tone, said, “This iss mine only pupil. Some day he will make me very proud.”

They sang a number of simple songs, ending with some hymns, Max adding a rather thin voice while he played the air, or again, some delicate obligato.

“You have a splendid voice,” he said heartily to Sydney when Mrs. Schmitz finally left them together. “Four or five years’ work would put you on the stage—if you care for that.”

“I never thought of it. Something else would fit me better, I guess.”

“Gee! She’s great, isn’t she?” Max said under his breath, nodding toward the door where Mrs. Schmitz had disappeared. “How is it she is just drudging—cooking, washing dishes? She should never use her hands but to play.”

Sydney looked again at the stranger. Some vague notion he, too, had had in regard to Mrs. Schmitz’s past, when she must have been taught by masters and spent long hours at the piano; but it never occurred to him that she was out of place in a new city, “running” a greenhouse and working twice as many hours as her men did. But this boy who had crept in at her pantry window to steal from her, through one half hour’s music, understood her better than Sydney in half a year’s sojourn in her house. The discovery gave him a feeling of inadequacy, as if he had been unkind to her, had failed in fealty to her.

Max toyed with the violin a little longer; looked over the music, now and then drawing a breath of sweetness from the strings, and speaking a running accompaniment all the while, so easy in word and movement, so fluent, that each moment he became more and more an enigma to the other.

Sydney found himself telling freely the little he knew of Mrs. Schmitz, her kindness to him, her generosity, her many eccentricities, one of which was her aversion to girls. “She can’t bear even to hear about them.”

“Did she ever have a daughter? And where’s her husband?”

“She’s lost both.”

Before Max could reply he was shaken with a paroxysm of coughing, the severest of the morning, yet light compared with those of the night before, so much had warmth and food done toward banishing the spectre, tuberculosis.

“Come upstairs with me while I do up my room. I’ll do yours too this morning. After that we’ll get out in the sun; that’s the best medicine you can have.”

“Do—do up your room? Do you make beds?”

“Why not? Do you think I’d let her?”

“No—no, of course not. But why doesn’t she have a maid?”

“She has a woman to wash and clean two or three times a week.”

“She—she does all the rest? And takes boys to board?”

“Yes.” Sydney was having his eyes still more opened. “The work in this house is nothing; she spends most of her time in the nursery.”

Max followed his leader upstairs, asking no more questions, but watching Sydney, astonished, as he went deftly through the morning work. Once or twice Max moved a chair, or tried to help with a blanket, but his awkwardness was so apparent that he laughed at himself.

“How did you learn?”

“She taught me.”

“But this isn’t boys’ work any more than washing dishes.”

“Why not? Doesn’t a boy sleep in a bed and eat his food from dishes? Why shouldn’t he do such work if it’s to save some one better than he is? Mrs. Schmitz for instance?”

“That’s right. But doesn’t it make you feel a little—sissylike?”

“The manliest chap I know, Billy To-morrow—Billy Bennett—isn’t ashamed to do any sort of work to save his mother and sisters. They used to be poorer than they are now.”

Max said nothing for a time. Then he broke out with, “How did you come to this snug berth anyhow?”

Sydney told him that Mr. Streeter had seen Mrs. Schmitz’s advertisement of a good home for a boy who would be steady, do a little light work, and be company for her at night. “She wasn’t afraid, never was; but she told Mr. Streeter she wanted some one to look at across the table when she ate.”

Max went to the window and looked out a moment, then he whirled and strode back to Sydney. “Here! Show me how you do everything! I will learn—beat you to it pretty soon—if I can.” He laughed almost joyously and Sydney felt only sincerity in it. “I’m going to accept her offer of a home till I get over this cough; but it shall not be for nothing. If I can’t render service for value received, I’ll—” His face darkened to a thought Sydney saw he had entertained before. “I’ll put this mug where it won’t need feeding.”

“Shut up! You’re no quitter. Put a few of her good dinners into you, and you’ll be ready to buck any game coming.”

“I believe you. But it won’t be her dinners alone; it’s herself. She radiates something good besides food.”

Sydney clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you like her. I am not able to speak of her as you do, but I—I think she’s the best ever.” He turned away, ashamed that he could not find words to say what he wished. He seemed the more dumb because of Max’s fluency.

“Is this the way you do the trick, Mr. Blanket-slinger?” Max asked, catching up a sheet and flapping it wide but crookedly over the mattress.

“No. It’s wrong side up and end to.”

“How do you tell that?”

Sydney showed him the right side of the hem that came uppermost, and the wide hem designating the upper end of the sheet.

Max thanked him and carefully flung the other sheet to place.

“That goes wrong side up. Turn it over.”

“For the love of Inverarity, why?”

“Right sides go together.”

“Why? Does one side of a sheet feel any different from another?”

“It does to her. Anyway there’s a reason, it’s the right way. I never asked her why.”

“I will then. I want to know all about it.”

They finished up the two rooms and Max proposed to “do” Mrs. Schmitz’s as well.

“No. Here’s where we stop. I don’t go into her room any more than if it was in another house.”

Max stared at him a second and nodded comprehendingly, when they went down and out into the sunshine.

“How strange to see the grass green and the trees budding in January.”

“Strange? Then you come from the East. It seems queer to me not to see flowers everywhere; and it’s awfully cold up here.”

“Is it so warm in California?”

“In spots. You can find all the climates there. I never stepped on snow till I came here, to the City of Green Hills; and there’s very little here.”

They walked up and down the narrow paths in the nursery, examining the sprouting cuttings growing in close rows, and the long heaped rows of earth where the bulbs would soon send forth their green shoots, Sydney freely giving of his small fund of information.

Suddenly from the farther end where the nursery abutted against a vacant block well hidden under a thick young forest growth, a voice hailed them, and a sinister face peered from behind a fir tree.

“Come with me, or I’ll make it hot for all that outfit you’re with, you—” He ended with unprintable oaths.

“That’s he! I must go! If I don’t he’ll hurt her—rob—or burn!” Max gave Sydney a look of utter disappointment and started off.