the
imagination! Impossible! Why, I remembered countless little anecdotes
about these very children, told me with the most evident fatherly
pride. He had even repeated the quaint remarks the youngest had made
on her return home from her first morning at the English school.
Impossible that these things could have been invented on the spur of
the moment. No; I could not possibly doubt the genuineness of my
model's spontaneous talk, especially as in those days he had had no
reason for expecting anything from me, and he had most certainly not
demanded anything. And then I remembered that tragic passage
describing how these three little ones, sheltered and fed by a kindly
soul, hid themselves when their father came to see them, fearing to be
reclaimed by him to hunger and cold. If Quarriar could invent such
things, he was indeed a poet, for in the whole literature of
starvation I could recall no better touch.

I went to Sir Asher. He said that Quarriar, challenged by Conn to
produce these children, had refused to do so, or to answer any further
questions. I found myself approving of his conduct. 'A man ought not
to be insulted by such absurd charges,' I said. Sir Asher merely
smiled and took up his usual unshakable position behind his
impregnable wall of official distrust and pessimism.

I wrote to Quarriar to call on me without delay. He came immediately,
his head bowed, his features care-worn and full of infinite suffering.
Yes, it was true; the piece-sorting had failed. For a few weeks all
had gone well. He had bought cuttings himself, had given the partner
thrust upon him by Conn various sums for the same purpose. They had
worked together, sorting in a cellar rented for the purpose, of which
his partner kept the key. So smoothly had things gone that he had felt
encouraged to invest even the reserve seven pounds I had given him,
but when the cellar was full of their common stock, and his own
suspicions had been lulled by the regular division of the
profits--seventeen shillings per week for each--one morning, on
arriving at the cellar to start the day's work, he found the place
locked, and when he called at the partner's house for an explanation,
the man laughed in his face. Everything in the cellar now belonged to
him, he claimed, insisting that Quarriar had eaten up the original
capital and his share of the profits besides.

'Besides, it never _was_ your money,' was the rogue's ultimate
argument. 'Why shouldn't _I_