e is a personal interest, which I serve
gratuitously; but I can undertake to promise you, on my own part, more
than the ordinary professional reward for your co-operation."

"Well, sir," said Grabman, mollified, "you speak very much like a
gentleman. My feelings were hurt at first, I own. I am hasty, but I can
listen to reason. Will you walk back with me to the house you have just
left? And suppose we then turn in and have a chop together, and compare
notes."

"Willingly," answered the tall stranger, and the two inquisitors
amicably joined company. The result of their inquiries was not, however,
very satisfactory. No one knew whither Mrs. Joplin had gone, though all
agreed it was in company with a man of bad character and vagrant habits;
all agreed, too, in the vague recollection of the child, and some
remembered that it was dressed in clothes finer than would have been
natural to an infant legally and filially appertaining to Mrs. Joplin.
One old woman remembered that on her reproaching Mrs. Joplin for some
act of great cruelty to the poor babe, she replied that it was not her
flesh and blood, and that if she had not expected more than she had got,
she would never have undertaken the charge. On comparing the information
gleaned at the previous places of their research, they found an entire
agreement as to the character personally borne by Mrs. Joplin. At the
village to which their inquiry had been first directed, she was known as
a respectable, precise young woman, one of a small congregation of rigid
Dissenters. She had married a member of the sect, and borne him a child,
which died two weeks after birth. She was then seen nursing another
infant, though how she came by it none knew. Shortly after this,
her husband, a journeyman carpenter of good repute, died; but to the
surprise of the neighbours, Mrs. Joplin continued to live as comfortably
as before, and seemed not to miss the wages of her husband,--nay, she
rather now, as if before kept back by the prudence of the deceased,
launched into a less thrifty mode of life, and a gayety of dress at
variance both with the mourning her recent loss should have imposed, and
the austere tenets of her sect. This indecorum excited angry curiosity,
and drew down stern remonstrance. Mrs. Joplin, in apparent disgust at
this intermeddling with her affairs, withdrew from the village to a
small town, about twenty miles distant, and there set up a shop. But her
moral lapse became now c