erted house.

"If--if anyone should come to enquire after me, will you be so good as
to say nothing of my having been here?" she asked.

"To be sure I will, with all the pleasure in life," responded my father,
who, it was evident even to me, had become a victim to her distressed
loveliness.

Emboldened by the effusive politeness of my parent, I went up to the
little girl and shyly offered her a blossom from my mother's geranium
upon the window-sill. A scrap of a hand, as cold as ice when it touched
mine, closed over the stem of the flower, and without looking at me, she
stood, very erect, with the scarlet geranium grasped stiffly between her
fingers.

"I'll take you to the bottom of the hill myself," protested my father,
"but I wish you could persuade yourself to try a bite of food befo' you
set out in the rain."

"It is important that I should lose no time," answered the woman,
drawing her breath quickly through her small white teeth, "but I fear
that I am taking you away from your supper?"

"Not at all, you will not deprive me in the least," stammered my father,
blushing up to his ears, while his straight flaxen hair appeared
literally to rise with embarrassment. "I--I--the fact is I'm not an
eater, mum."

For an instant, remembering the story of Ananias I had heard in
Sunday-school, I looked round in terror, half expecting to hear the
dreadful feet of the young men on the pavement. But he passed scathless
for the hour at least, and our visitor had turned to receive her
half-dried cloak from my mother's hands, when her face changed suddenly
to a more deadly pallor, and seizing the little girl by the shoulder,
she fled, like a small frightened animal, across the threshold into the
kitchen.

My father's hand had barely reached the knob of the street door, when it
opened and a man in a rubber coat entered, and stopped short in the
centre of the room, where he stood blinking rapidly in the lamplight. I
heard the rain drip with a soft pattering sound from his coat to the
floor, and when he wheeled about, after an instant in which his glance
searched the room, I saw that his face was flushed and his eyes swimming
and bloodshot. There was in his look, as I remember it now, something of
the inflamed yet bridled cruelty of a bird of prey.

"Have you noticed a lady with a little girl go by?" he enquired.

At his question my father fell back a step or two until he stood
squarely planted before the door into the kitc