ight when I put the last touch to my picture, and
had not been seen by his mother since. She now began to soften and to
cry, and I observed that maternity was in her as well as cheap gin. I
endeavoured to comfort her and promised that little Jack should be
found.

"'If he ain't found,' she sobbed, 'I'm done for, I am; 'e's my hall.'

"There was something horribly genuine in the sound of this cry. I began
to see beyond the gin in which this poor woman was soaked; I began to
see her half-drowned soul that yet had life, had breath.

"'We'll find him,' I said.

"'Never, never,' she wailed, rocking her thin body to and fro, 'I know
'e's gone to sea, 'e 'as. Jack's run away fur a sailor.'

"At these words I turned cold, for I felt as if they were true. I saw in
a flash the result of my experiment. I had shown the boy the way that
led to the great sea. Perhaps that night, even as he left my door, he
had seen in fancy the white waves playing before him in the distance,
the ships go sailing by. He had heard siren voices calling his youth and
he had heeded them. His old mother kept on cursing me at intervals.
Instinct, rather than actual knowledge, led her to attribute this
disappearance to my initiative. I did not attempt to reason her out of
the belief, for alas! I began to hold it myself, Uniacke."

"You thought Jack had run away to sea, prompted by all that you had told
him of the sea?"

"Yes. And I think it still."

"Think--then you don't--"

"I don't know it, you'd say? Do I not? Uniacke, a little while ago, when
you told me of that--that woman for whom you cared much, you remember my
saying to you, was there not something within you that would tell you
if she were dead?"

"Yes, I remember."

"That something which makes a man know a thing without what is generally
called knowledge of it. Well, that something within me makes me know
that little Jack did run away to sea. I searched for him, I strove, as
far as one can do such a thing, to sift all the innumerable grains of
London through my fingers to find that one little grain I wanted. I
spared no pains in my search. Conceive, even, that I escorted Drury Lane
in the black bonnet to the Docks, to ships lying in the Thames, to a
thousand places! It was all in vain; the wonder-child was swallowed up.
I had indeed drowned little Jack in the sea. I have never set eyes on
him since he left me on the evening of the day when I completed my
picture. Shall I ever set eye