who for two years starved himself, living on
five shillings a week--that was before you came to London, when he
was here alone. Even your mother knew nothing of it till years
afterwards--so that no man should be a penny the poorer for having
trusted his good name. Do you think the crew of chandlers and brokers,
dock hustlers and freight wreckers would have found him a useful man of
business, even had they come to settle here?"

I have no answer; nor does the old House wait for any, but talks on.

"And your mother! would any but a child have taken that soft-tongued
wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent?
Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out
into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly?
Children! poor babies they were, both of them."

"Tell me," I say--for at such times all my stock of common sense is not
sufficient to convince me that the old House is but clay. From its walls
so full of voices, from its floors so thick with footsteps, surely it
has learned to live; as a violin, long played on, comes to learn at last
a music of its own. "Tell me, I was but a child to whom life speaks in a
strange tongue, was there any truth in the story?"

"Truth!" snaps out the old House; "just truth enough to plant a lie
upon; and Lord knows not much ground is needed for that weed. I saw
what I saw, and I know what I know. Your mother had a good man, and
your father a true wife, but it was the old story: a man's way is not a
woman's way, and a woman's way is not a man's way, so there lives ever
doubt between them."

"But they came together in the end," I say, remembering.

"Aye, in the end," answers the House. "That is when you begin to
understand, you men and women, when you come to the end."

The grave face of a not too recently washed angel peeps shyly at
me through the railings, then, as I turn my head, darts back and
disappears.

"What has become of her?" I ask.

"She? Oh, she is well enough," replies the House. "She lives close here.
You must have passed the shop. You might have seen her had you looked
in. She weighs fourteen stone, about; and has nine children living. She
would be pleased to see you."

"Thank you," I say, with a laugh that is not wholly a laugh; "I do not
think I will call." But I still hear the pit-pat of her tiny feet, dying
down the long street.

The faces thicken round me. A large looming, rubicund visage smil