were fled. I suppose I
really am quite elderly.

"I should like to know her name, sir," she said, "that I may mention her
with loving respect in my prayers."

I raised the woman and told her the name. It was not Mary. "But she has
a home," I said, "as you have, and I have none. Perhaps, ma'am, it would
be better worth your while to mention me."

It was this woman, now in health, whom I intrusted with the purchase of
the outfits, "one for a boy of six months," I explained to her, "and one
for a boy of a year," for the painter had boasted to me of David's rapid
growth. I think she was a little surprised to find that both outfits
were for the same house; and she certainly betrayed an ignoble curiosity
about the mother's Christian name, but she was much easier to brow-beat
than a fine lady would have been, and I am sure she and her daughter
enjoyed themselves hugely in the shops, from one of which I shall never
forget Irene emerging proudly with a commissionaire, who conducted her
under an umbrella to the cab where I was lying in wait. I think that was
the most celestial walk of Irene's life.

I told Mrs. Hicking to give the articles a little active ill-treatment
that they might not look quite new, at which she exclaimed, not being in
my secret, and then to forward them to me. I then sent them to Mary and
rejoiced in my devilish cunning all the evening, but chagrin came in the
morning with a letter from her which showed she knew all, that I was her
Mr. Anon, and that there never had been a Timothy. I think I was never
so gravelled. Even now I don't know how she had contrived it.

Her cleverness raised such a demon in me that I locked away her letter
at once and have seldom read it since. No married lady should have
indited such an epistle to a single man. It said, with other things
which I decline to repeat, that I was her good fairy. As a sample of the
deliberate falsehoods in it, I may mention that she said David loved me
already. She hoped that I would come in often to see her husband, who
was very proud of my friendship, and suggested that I should pay him my
first visit to-day at three o'clock, an hour at which, as I happened to
know, he is always away giving a painting-lesson. In short, she wanted
first to meet me alone, so that she might draw the delicious, respectful
romance out of me, and afterward repeat it to him, with sighs and little
peeps at him over her pocket-handkerchief.

She had dropped what were