ion. He
saw how anxious and timid she was, and appeared sorry.

"I am afraid, Amy, you'll be vexed this time. Upon my life I am!"

"I am very sorry to hear you say so, Tip. Have you come back?"

"Why--yes."

"Not expecting this time that what you had found would answer very well,
I am less surprised and sorry than I might have been, Tip."

"Ah! But that's not the worst of it."

"Not the worst of it?"

"Don't look so startled. No, Amy, not the worst of it. I have come back,
you see; but--_don't_ look so startled--I have come back in what I may
call a new way. I am off the volunteer list altogether. I am in now, as
one of the regulars. I'm here in prison for debt, like everybody else."

"Oh! Don't say that you are a prisoner, Tip! Don't, don't!"

"Well, I don't want to say it," he returned in unwilling tone; "but if
you can't understand me without my saying it, what am I to do? I am in
for forty pound odd."

For the first time in all those years, she sunk under her cares. She
cried, with her clasped hands lifted above her head, that it would kill
their father if he ever knew it; and fell down at Tip's worthless feet.

It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring
_him_ to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside
himself if he knew the truth. Tip thought that there was nothing strange
in being there a prisoner, but he agreed that his father should not be
told about it. There were plenty of reasons that could be given for his
return; it was accounted for to the father in the usual way; and the
collegians, with a better understanding of the kind fraud than Tip,
stood by it faithfully.

This was the life, and this the history, of the Child of the Marshalsea,
at twenty-two. With a still abiding interest in the one miserable yard
and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and fro in
it shrinking now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out
to everyone. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls, she had found
it necessary to hide where she lived, and to come and go secretly as she
could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she
had never slept in her life. Her original timidity had grown with this
concealment, and her light step and her little figure shunned the
thronged streets while they passed along them.

Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all
things else. Innocent, in the mist thr