"that will be much better. You'll like Mrs. Parrot."

Rather recklessly, I hoped this might prove to be true; for Mrs. Parrot
was a little difficult at times....

It was Maltby Phar who saw me coming up the steps with a limp child in
my arms, and who opened the screen door for me. "Aha!" he exclaimed.
"Done it this time, eh! Always knew you would, sooner or later. You're
too damned absent-minded to drive a car. You----"

"Nonsense!" I struck in. "Tell Mrs. Parrot to ring up Doctor Stevens.
Then send her to me." And I continued on upstairs with Susan.

When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of
a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared
greasy, permanent-looking stains.

"Mercy," sighed Mrs. Parrot, "if you've killed the poor creature,
nobody's sorrier than I am! But why couldn't you have laid her down on
the floor? She wouldn't have known."

In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there
I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have
to go.

Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried
explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge--and then made twenty-five
an hour to Birch Street.

However, Susan's intuitions had been correct. We found Bob's four-room
house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it....
We were an hour too late.

"Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after," shrilled Mrs. Perkins
to us--Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch
Street. "But it's only what was to be looked for, and I guess it'll be a
lesson to some. You can't expect no better end than that," perorated
Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green
eyes snapped with electric malice, "you can't expect no better end than
that to sech _brazen_ immorality!"

"My God," groaned Maltby, as we sped away, "How they have enjoyed it
all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them
you'd found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the
cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world!

"By the way," he added, as we turned once more into the dignified
breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, "what'll you do with the homely little
brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?"

The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes.

"Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her
relatives