screw? In that I was disappointed, the best nurse in the world
might not know of a screw. But the big Thomas did not wait to
hear; be was sure the little Thomas had, and he said we were
coming upstairs to restore it to him. Of course I had said by
this time that I was Zerlina's sister-in-law.

We went upstairs, I following the tall Thomas, past the drawing-
room, past that bedroom whose door I knew was closed. A mother's
bedroom is nearly always in the same place in a London house, a
child blindfolded could find it, and the handle of a mother's door
is always within the reach of the smallest child; and so easily
does it turn, that the door opens at the slightest pressure of the
smallest fingers.

Up we went to Thomas's own bedroom. There in his bed he sat, no
longer crying, but still sad and solemn, with evidences in his
face of a sorrow that rankled. He smiled when he saw me, too much
of a gentleman to show any surprise at seeing me in his bedroom.

"Thomas," I said, "I have brought you back your screw which you
lost." I put it in his outstretched hand, and a smile rippled all
over his face.

Suddenly from out the darkness came a stentorian voice, "Right
hand, Tomus!" It was Fraulein! Thomas put out his right hand,
and I, putting aside all convention, gave him a real "Sara hug"
for the sake of that mother whose door was closed. It then began
to dawn upon me how very unconventional it was of me to be hugging
a comparatively strange child, in a perfectly strange house, and I
hastily said good-night to the small Thomas and the big Thomas,