is my cousin, the child my ward, and I know your
grandfather well. For a month you must not come, but trust me and give
me your word, and all may yet go well."

So it was a month since Antoine had been to the little house in Bethnal
Green--and in all that slack time neither Sara nor her aunt had been to
the warehouse for work or money.

But on that night, when Antoine was to sup with his grandfather, the
month's probation was at an end. Even had it not been, he would have
felt that he must break his promise, for on that very morning as he
stood at the door after the warehouse had been opened, a boy ran up and
placed a note in his hand--a mere slip of paper, on which was scrawled--

_"Will you never come again?--S. R."_

His sensitive nature was shocked at such a summons, and for the first
time he had a sharp pang of doubt whether he was not to be awakened from
a foolish dream. It was with a heavy heart that he bent his steps along
the narrow tangle of streets that lay between his house and the edge of
a great piece of waste ground known as Hare Street Fields, and even had
he been less preoccupied he might not have noticed that he was followed
by two men, who kept close to him in the shadows of the houses, and
walked as noiselessly as cats, and with the same stealthy tread.

Mrs. Rondeau was sitting in her lower room, sewing by the light of a
weaver's oil-lamp which hung from a string fastened to the mantel-piece.
The place was very bare. Few of the little ornaments that usually
decorate even a poor home remained, and the good woman's eyes were red
with recent crying. The loom in the upper part of the house was empty,
and so was the cupboard, or very nearly so.

"There goes the quarter," she said, as she heard the chiming of a
distant clock. "I wish I'd gone myself instead of sending the poor
child. What would Peter say if he knew--ah! and what would that old
flinty-hearted wretch say if _he_ knew! How I wish she would come, even
if she came back without the money!"

The night had set in gloomily enough, as Sara Rondeau went quickly
through the now almost deserted streets on her way to a dim shop, where
three golden balls hung to an iron bracket at the door, to show that a
pawnbroker's business was carried on within. It was not the first visit
she had made to this establishment, for the poor little household
ornaments, the loss of which had left her home so bleak and bare, were
now in the safekeeping of