en house with broken panes in the upper windows and a
collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.

A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons,
and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles
was away on circuit. "I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny
explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded
surroundings. "She's not well," the woman replied, with instant
suspicion. "I don't just like to let a chancy person see her." He
discarded all subterfuge. "I am her father," he stated. The other
shifted to a whining self-defence. "And her in this sink!" she
exclaimed, gazing at Jasper Penny's furred coat, his glossy hat and
gloves and ebony cane.

"I did all for her I could, considering the small money I was promised,
and then half the time I didn't get that, neither. The lady owes for
three weeks right now. I suppose you'll have to come in," she concluded
grudgingly. They entered a dark hall, clay cold. Beyond, in a slovenly
kitchen hardly warmer, he found Eunice, his daughter; a curiously
sluggish child with a pinched, hueless face and a meagre body in a man's
worn flannel shirt and ragged skirt and stockings.

"Here's your father," Mrs. Needles ejaculated.

Eunice stood in the middle of the bare floor, staring with pallid, open
mouth at the imposing figure of the man. She said nothing; and Jasper
Penny found her silence more accusing than a shrill torrent of reproach.
"She's kind of heavy like," Mrs. Needles explained. "I have come to take
you away," Jasper Penny said. Then, turning to the woman: "Are those all
the clothes she has?" She grew duskily red. "There are some others
about, but I don't just know where, and then she spoils them so fast."

"That's a lie," the child announced, with a faint patch of colour on
either thin cheek. "Mr. Needles sold them." The man decided to ignore
such issues; his sole wish now was to take Eunice away as speedily as
possible. "Well," he directed impatiently, "get a shawl, something to
wrap her in." He regretted vainly that he had not come for the child in
a carriage. He paid without a question what the woman said was owing;
and, with Eunice folded in a ragged plaid, prepared to depart. "I
guess," the child decided, in a strangely mature voice, "we'd better
take my medicine." She turned toward a mantel, Mrs. Needles made a quick
movement in the same direction, but the small shape