t her breath
as Mr. Mortimer jumped aboard and laid hold of the tiller. But still
she ran beside panting.

"You won't tell him?"

Mr. Mortimer waved a hand.

"And--and you'll hide 'em--for he's bound to come askin'--you'll hide
'em if you can--"

Mr. Mortimer heard, but could not answer for the moment, the steerage
claiming all his attention. When he turned towards the bank she was no
longer there. He looked back over his shoulder. She had come to a dead
halt and stood watching, her print gown glimmering in the dusk. And so,
as the boat rounded the bend by the Brewery, he lost sight of her.

He passed a hand over his brow.

"Mysterious business," he mused; "devilish mysterious. On the face of
it looks as if my friend Smiles, not content with self-help in its
ordinary forms, has been helping himself to orphans! Must speak to him
about it."

He pondered, gazing up the dim waterway, and by-and-by broke into a
chuckle.

He chuckled again twenty minutes later, when, having stabled Old
Jubilee, he crossed the yard to sup and to season the meal with a
relation of his adventure.

"Such an encounter, my poppet!" he announced, groping his way across to
the caravan, where his spouse had lit the lamp and stood in the doorway
awaiting him. "Smiles--our ingenuous Smiles--has decoyed, has laid me
under suspicion; and of what, d'you think? Stealing orphans!"

"Hush!" answered Mrs. Mortimer. "They 're here."

"They? Who? . . . Not the bailiffs? Arabella, don't tell me it's the
bailiffs again!"

Mr. Mortimer drew back as though a snake lay coiled on the caravan
steps.

"It's not the bailiffs, Stanislas; it's the orphans."

"But--but, my sweet, there must be some mistake. I--er--actually, of
course, I have nothing to do with any orphans whatsoever."

"Oh, yes, you have," his wife assured him composedly. "They are inside
here, with a yellow dog."

While Mr. Mortimer yet reeled under this news the door of the courtyard
rattled and creaked open in the darkness. A lantern showed in the
opening, and the bearer of it, catching sight of the lit caravan,
approached with quick, determined strides.

"Can you inform me," asked a high clerical voice, "where I can find Mr.
Christopher Hucks?"

The stranger held his lantern high, so that its ray fell on his face,
and with that Mr. Mortimer groaned and collapsed upon the lowest step,
where mercifully his wife's ample shadow spread an aegis over him.

"Mr. Hucks,