girl. "You'll tell the missus it was you
arsked for 'em, won't yer?"

"Yes, of course."

She went out, and the Lintons looked at each other, and then at the
hopeless little room. The furniture was black horsehair, very shiny
and hard and slippery; there was a gimcrack bamboo overmantel, with
much speckled glass, and the pictures were of the kind peculiar to
London lodging-houses, apt to promote indigestion in the beholder.
There was one little window, looking out upon a blank courtyard and a
dirty little side-street, where children played and fought
incessantly, and stray curs nosed the rubbish in the gutters in the
hope of finding food. There was nothing green to be seen, nothing
clean, nothing pleasant.

"Oh, poor kiddies!" said Norah, under her breath.

The door opened and they came in; not shyly--the London child is
seldom shy--but frankly curious, and in the case of the elder two,
with suspicion. Three white-faced mites, as children well may be who
have spent a London summer in a Bloomsbury square, where the very
pavements sweat tar, and the breathless, sticky heat is as cruel by
night as by day. A boy of six, straight and well-grown, with dark
hair and eyes, who held by the hand a small toddling person with damp
rings of golden hair: behind them a slender little girl, a little too
shadowy for a mother's heart to be easy; with big brown eyes peeping
elfishly from a cloud of brown curls.

The boy spoke sullenly.

"Eva told us to come in," he said.

"We wanted you to take care of us," said Norah. "You see, your mother
isn't here."

"But we can't have tea," said the boy. "Eva says she isn't cleaned up
yet, and besides, there's no milk, and very likely Mother'll forget
the cakes, she said."

"But we don't want tea," said Norah. "We had a big lunch, not so long
ago. And besides, we've got something nicer than tea. It's in his
pocket." She nodded at her father, who suddenly smiled in the way
that made every child love him, and, fishing in his pocket drew out a
square white box--at sight of which the baby said delightedly, "Choc!"
and a kind of incredulous wonder, rather pitiful to see, came into the
eyes of Geoffrey and his sister.

"There's a very difficult red ribbon on this," said Mr. Linton,
fumbling with it. "I can't undo it." He smiled at little Alison.
"You show me how."

She was across the room in a flash, the baby at her heels, while
Geoffrey made a slow step or two, and then stoppe