the kids a-sickenin' for measles! Out with it, M'riar! Which is
it--Dave?"

"No, it ain't any such a thing. Nor yet Dolly.... Anyone ever see such a
candle?"

"Then it's scarlatinar, or mumps. One or other on 'em!"

"Neither one nor t'other, Mo. 'Tain't neither Dave nor Dolly, this
time." But something or other was somebody or something, that was clear!
Aunt M'riar may have meant this, and yet not seen how very clear she
made it. She recurred to that candle, and a suggestion of Uncle Mo's.
"It's easy sayin', 'Run the toller off,' Mo; but who's to do it with
such a little flame?"

Presently the candle, carefully fostered, picked up heart, and the
tension of doubt about its future was relieved. "She'll do now," said
Uncle Mo, assigning it a gender it had no claim to. "But what's gone
wrong, M'riar?"

The appeal for information was too simple and direct to allow of keeping
it back; without, at least, increasing its implied importance. Aunt
M'riar only intensified this when she answered:--"Nothing at all! At
least, nothing to nobody but me. Tell you to-morrow, Mo! It's time we
was all abed. Mind you don't wake up Dave!" For Dave was becoming his
uncle's bedfellow, and Dolly her aunt's; exchanges to vary monotony
growing less frequent as the children grew older.

But Uncle Mo did not rise to depart. He received the candle, adolescent
at last, and sat holding it and thinking. He had become quite alive now
to what had impressed Mr. Jerry in Aunt M'riar's appearance and manner,
and was harking back over recent events to find something that would
account for it. The candle's secondary education gave him an excuse. Its
maturity would have left him no choice but to go to bed.

A light that flashed through his mind anticipated it. "It's never that
beggar," said he, and then, seeing that his description was
insufficient:--"Which one? Why, the one we was a-talking of only this
morning. Him I've been rounding off with Inspector Rowe--our boy's man
he saw in the Park. You've not been alarmin' yourself about _him_?" For
Uncle Mo thought he could see his way to alarm for a woman, even a
plucky one, in the mere proximity of such a ruffian. He would have gone
on to say that the convict was, by now, probably again in the hands of
the police, but he saw as the candle flared that Aunt M'riar's usually
fresh complexion had gone grey-white, and that she was nodding in
confirmation of something half-spoken that she could not articulate.