uld like to see him," said Swinny, in an
insinuating manner.

A hard melancholy voice answered, "I don't want to see him. I don't want
to see him any more."

All the same Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned and looked after him as he was
carried through the doorway. She could just see the downy back of his
innocent head, and his ridiculous frock bulging roundly over the nurse's
arm. But whether she was thinking of him at that moment God only knows.

The household was informed that its master would not return that evening
after all; that no date was fixed for his coming.

Later on Pinker, the guardian of the hearth, finding those fragments of
letters tried to put them together again. Tyson's letter it was
impossible to restore. It had been torn to atoms in a vicious fury of
destruction. But by great good luck Stanistreet's (a mere note) had been
more tenderly dealt with. It was torn in four neat pieces; the text,
though corrupt, was fairly legible, and left little to the ingenuity of
the scholiast. The Captain was staying in the neighborhood. He proposed
to call on Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Would she be at home on Wednesday
afternoon? Now, to Pinker's certain knowledge, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had
taken the letters to the post herself that morning. That meant secrecy,
and secrecy meant mischief.

How was she going to get through the next two days? This was provided
for. Baby was a bad sleeper. That night he cried as he had never cried
before. Not violently; he was too weak for that, but with a sound like
the tongue-tied whimper of some tiny animal. Swinny had slept through
worse noise many a night. Now he cried from midnight to cock-crow; and on
Tuesday morning Swinny was crying too. He had had one of his "little
attacks," after which he began to show signs of rapid wasting.

He had got something which Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never heard
of--"marasmus," the doctor called it. She hoped it was nothing very bad.

Then the truth came out piecemeal, through Swinny's confession and the
witness of her fellow-servants. The wretched woman's movements had been
wholly determined by the movements of Pinker; and she had been in the
habit of leaving the child in the servants' hall, where the cook, being
an affectionate motherly woman, made much of him, and fed him with
strange food. He had had an "attack" the last time she did this, and
Swinny, who valued her place for more reasons than one, had been afraid
to say anything about it. Preoccupied with her