thought. By-and-by he picked up a pair of spectacles,
turned, and adjusted them slowly whilst he stared down on her.

"Where did you get this information?"

Tilda's first impulse was to show him her scrap of paper, but she
thought better of it. She would keep it back while she could, as a
possible trump card. Besides, she feared and distrusted this man with
the little eyes. Seen through glasses they were worse than ever.

"He's wanted by someone very particular," she repeated.

"By whom? Speak up, child! Who sent you?"

Heaven knows to what invisible spirits the child appealed. They were
certainly disreputable ones, as will be seen; but they heard her prayer,
and came to her now in her extremity. Hardly knowing what she did, she
opened on this man a pair of eyes seraphically innocent, and asked--

"W'y, haven't you seen my aunt?"

"Your aunt?"

"She _promised_ to call here at twelve-thirty, an' I was to meet her.
But"--here Tilda had to keep a tight hold on her voice--"per'aps I'm
early?"

"It's close upon one o'clock," said Doctor Glasson, with a glance
towards the mantelshelf. "What is your aunt's name, and her business?"

"She's called Brown--Martha Brown--_Mrs._ Martha Brown, and she keeps a
milliner's shop in the Edgeware Road, London," panted Tilda.

"I should have asked, What is her business with me?" Doctor Glasson
corrected his question severely.

"I think--I dunno--but I _think_, sir, she might be wantin' to enter me
for a orphlan. My pa, sir, was knocked down an' killed by a motor-car.
It was in the early days," pursued Tilda, desperate now and aghast at
her own invention. The lies seemed to spring to her lips full grown.
"Pa was a stableman, sir, at Buckin'am Palace, and often and often I've
'eard 'im tell mother what'd be the end of 'im. He 'd seen it in a
dream. And mother, _she_ was a stewardess in a Sou'-Western boat that
got cut in two last year. Maybe you read of it in the papers?"

Tears by this time filled the child's eyes. She was casting about to
invent a last dying speech for her mother, when Doctor Glasson
interrupted.

"If your aunt wishes to place you here, it might perhaps be managed, for
a consideration. Just now we have no room for-er--non-paying children.
But you began by asking for Arthur Miles."

"Surname Chandon."

"Yes--quite so--Chandon." He picked up a pencil and a half-sheet of
paper from the desk, and wrote the name. "Born at Kingsand--I think yo