our own. They wrote you a
lie--that's certain; and I'm as hard as most upon liars; but,
considering all, I don't blame 'em. They weren't mercenary, anyway.
They only wanted to have no more truck with you."

"Have you seen the boy?"

Again Miss Sally nodded.

"Yes, and there's no doubting the parentage. I never saw that
cross-hatched under-lip in any but a Chandon, though you _do_ hide it
with a beard: let alone that he carries the four lozenges tattooed on
his shoulder. Ned Commins did that. There was a moment, belike, when
they weakened--either he or the woman. But you had best hear the story,
and then you can judge the evidence for yourself."

She told it. He listened with set face, interposing here and there to
ask a question, or to weigh one detail of her narrative against another.

"If the children should be lost--which God forbid!" she wound up, "--and
if I never did another good day's work in my life, I'll remember that
they started me to clear that infernal Orphanage. It's by the
interposition of Heaven that you didn't find me on Paddington platform
with three-and-twenty children under my wing. 'Interposition of
Heaven,' did I say? You may call it, if you will, the constant and
consistent foolishness of my brother Elphinstone. In every tight corner
of my life I've learnt to trust in Elphinstone for a fool, and he has
never betrayed me yet. There I was in the hotel with these
twenty-three derelicts, all underfed, and all more or less mentally
defective through Glasson's ill-treatment. Two or three were actually
crying, in a feeble way, to be 'taken home,' as they called it. They
were afraid--afraid of their kind, afraid of strange faces, afraid of
everything but to be starved and whipped. I was forced to send out and
buy new clothes for some, there and then; and their backs, when I
stripped 'em, were criss-crossed with weals--not quite fresh, you
understand, for Glasson had been kept busy of late, and the woman
Huggins hadn't his arm. Well, there I was, stranded, with these
creatures on my hands, all of 'em, as you may say, looking up at me in a
dumb way, and wanting to know why I couldn't have let 'em alone--and if
ever I smash up another Orphanage you may call me a Turk, and put me in
a harem--when all of a sudden it occurred to me to look up the names of
the benevolent parties backing the institution. The woman had given me
a copy of the prospectus, intending to impress me. I promised m