ept
out." And as remembrance after remembrance awoke, his heart warmed
strangely to this brown-haired girl who seemed to be always stumbling
into his pathway.

Dirty, ragged imp as she was, that strange inexplicable sense of kinship
stirred within him. Stirred as it had never stirred towards alien John,
who was after all only the son of his first love's son, with no blood of
his at all in him; stirred as it had stirred towards no one living since
his daughter had left him more than seventeen years ago.

He put out one hand and touched her hair (she could not know, no one
could know, of course)--his only daughter's little child!

And Betty slept on. Had she but known it, a bent-shouldered old
gentleman, who might have exerted a wonderful influence over her whole
life, was at that moment looking at her with softened eyes. But great
possibilities are frequently blighted by small importunities.

The greengrocer chose this moment to open the front door and look into
the hall, and the captain saw him, started, and lost his feeling of
kinship for the sleeper.

"Good evenin'," said the greengrocer blandly, "I found her about an hour
ago, an' came straight 'ome with her."

Captain Carew explained briefly that his boy had been returned to him
about an hour ago, and that the promised reward had been given on his
behalf to the policeman.

The man looked crestfallen.

"My wife told me," he said, "when I come back from the markets. She said
somebody had lost a boy, and you had lost a girl. And your reward was
the biggest, so I went for the girl."

Captain Carew put his hand in his pocket, and shook his head. To pay
for Betty seemed to him to be publicly claiming her. Yet he could not
help being glad that she was found.

"And she ain't nothin' to you?" said the man, most evidently
disappointed.

"Nothing!" said Captain Carew firmly; "but I hear that she ran away with
my boy--to make her fortune. She lives, I believe, in a small
weather-board cottage a few yards further on."

He felt much stronger after he had spoken that sentence. Of course she
was nothing to him. He walked to his library, and then looked over his
shoulder, and saw the man just stooping over the little girl again. And
then, for no reason at all, of course, he put his hand into his pocket
again, drew out a sovereign and gave it to the man.

"To make up for your mistake," he said.

Then he went away and shut the library door, while the two went away.