a
_Morning Post_. At that moment his aunt entered the room.

"This is a poor boy who has lost his way--and lost his memory. He
doesn't know who he is or where he comes from," explained Van Cheele
desperately, glancing apprehensively at the waif's face to see whether he
was going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage propensities.

Miss Van Cheele was enormously interested.

"Perhaps his underlinen is marked," she suggested.

"He seems to have lost most of that, too," said Van Cheele, making
frantic little grabs at the _Morning Post_ to keep it in its place.

A naked homeless child appealed to Miss Van Cheele as warmly as a stray
kitten or derelict puppy would have done.

"We must do all we can for him," she decided, and in a very short time a
messenger, dispatched to the rectory, where a page-boy was kept, had
returned with a suit of pantry clothes, and the necessary accessories of
shirt, shoes, collar, etc. Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost
none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes, but his aunt found him
sweet.

"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said.
"Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."

Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being
grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not diminished
by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the
house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained
shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the
canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put
itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps. More than ever he was
resolved to consult Cunningham without loss of time.

As he drove off to the station his aunt was arranging that Gabriel-Ernest
should help her to entertain the infant members of her Sunday-school
class at tea that afternoon.

Cunningham was not at first disposed to be communicative.

"My mother died of some brain trouble," he explained, "so you will
understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly
fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen."

"But what _did_ you see?" persisted Van Cheele.

"What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really sane
man could dignify it with the credit of having actually happened. I was
standing, the last evening I was with you, half-hidden in the
hedge-growth by the orchard gate, watchin