“’Bout as big as yourn.”  There was a choke in Jonesy’s voice now.  “Seein’ yourn put his arm across your shoulder and pullin’ your head back by one ear and pinchin’ you sort in fun like, made me think the way Barney uster do to me.”

Keith did not know what to say, so there was a long, awkward pause.

“I’d never a-left him,” said Jonesy, “but the boss said it ’ud only be a little while and we’d make so much money showin’ the bear that I’d have a whole pile to take home.  I could ride back on the cars and take a whole trunk full of nice things to Barney,—­clothes, and candy, and a swell watch and chain, and a bustin’ beauty of a bike.  Now the bear’s sold and the boss has run away, and I don’t know how I can get back to Barney.  Him an me’s all each other’s got, and I want to see him so bad.”

The little fellow’s lip quivered, and he put up one bandaged hand to wipe away the hot tears that would keep coming, in spite of his efforts not to make a baby of himself.  There was something so pitiful in the gesture that Keith looked across at Malcolm and then patted the bedclothes with an affectionate little hand.

“Never mind, Jonesy,” he said, “papa will be home in the spring and he’ll send you back to Barney.”  But Jonesy never having known anything of fathers whose chief pleasure is in spending money to make little sons happy, was not comforted by that promise as much as Keith thought he ought to be.

“But I won’t be here then,” he sobbed.  “They’re goin’ to put me in a ’sylum, and I can’t get out for so long that maybe Barney will be dead before we ever find each other again.”

He was crying violently now.

“Who is going to put you in an asylum?” asked Malcolm, lifting an end of the pillow under which Jonesy’s head had burrowed, to hide the grief that his eight-year-old manhood made him too proud to show.

“An old lady with white hair what comes here every day.  The professor said he would keep me if he wasn’t so old and hard up, and she said as how a ’sylum was the proper place for a child of the slums, and he said yes if they wasn’t nobody to care for ’em.  But I’ve got somebody!” he cried.  “I’ve got Barney!  Oh, don’t let them shut me up somewhere so I can’t never get back to Barney!”

“They don’t shut you up when they send you to an asylum,” said Malcolm.  “The one near here is a lovely big house, with acres of green grass around it, and orchards and vine-yards, and they are ever so good to the children, and give them plenty to eat and wear, and send them to school.”

“Barney wouldn’t be there,” sobbed Jonesy, diving under the pillow again.  “I don’t want nothing but him.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” said Malcolm, as he heard the professor coming back.  “If we could only keep you here until spring, I am sure that papa would send you back all right.  He’s always helping people that get into trouble.”