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prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood.
Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing
maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and
tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in
its present repose it looked moist and shiny from indiscriminate and
promiscuous osculation.

"Let's borrow Baby Buckly," I said recklessly.

Sarah Walker at once stopped crying. I don't know how she did it, but
the cessation was instantaneous, as if she had turned off a tap
somewhere.

"And put it in Mr. Peters' bed!" I continued.

Peters being notoriously a grim bachelor, the bare suggestion bristled
with outrage. Sarah Walker's eyes sparkled.

"You don't mean it!--go 'way!"--she said with affected coyness.

"But I do! Come."

We extracted it noiselessly together--that is, Sarah Walker did, with
deft womanliness--carried it darkly along the hall to No. 27, and
deposited it in Peters' bed, where it lay like a freshly opened oyster.
We then returned hand in hand to my room, where we looked out of the
window on the sea. It was observable that there was no lack of
interest in Sarah Walker now.

Before five minutes had elapsed some one breathlessly passed the open
door while we were still engaged in marine observation. This was
followed by return footsteps and a succession of swiftly rustling
garments, until the majority of the women in our wing had apparently
passed our room, and we saw an irregular stream of nursemaids and
mothers converging towards the hotel out of the grateful shadow of
arbors, trees, and marquees. In fact we were still engaged in
observation when Sarah Walker's nurse came to fetch her away, and to
inform her that "by rights" Baby Buckly's nurse and Mr. Peters should
both be made to leave the hotel that very night. Sarah Walker
permitted herself to be led off with dry but expressive eyes. That
evening she did not cry, but, on being taken into the usual custody for
disturbance, was found to be purple with suppressed laughter.

This was the beginning of my intimacy with Sarah Walker. But while it
was evident that whatever influence I obtained over her was due to my
being particeps criminis, I think it was accepted that a regular
abduction of infants might become in time monotonous if not dangerous.
So she was satisfied with the knowledge that I could not now, without
the most glaring hypocrisy, obtrude a m