hink I'm going to do about it?'

"And Sabre said, 'Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor
creature in.'

"That's what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said
it--all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and
with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly
well imagine his wife's face as she heard him, by Jove, I can. She was
furious. Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless
long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn't. Sabre said she worked
herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that
cut him like a knife--language like speaking of the baby as 'that brat.'
It made him wince. It would--the sort of chap he is. And he said that
the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl's
position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

"He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case.
He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make
some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said,
'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my
wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd
turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a
claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a
claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to
_us_, picking _us_ out from everybody, for succour. Damn it, you've got
to respond. You're picked out. You! One human creature by another human
creature. Breathing the same air. Sharing the same mortality.
Responsible to the same God. You've got to! You can't help yourself.
You're caught. If you hear some one appealing to any one else you can
scuttle out of it. Get away. Pass by on the other side. Square it with
your conscience any old how. But when that some one comes to you, you're
done, you're fixed. You may hate it. You may loathe and detest the
position that's been forced on you. But it's there. You can't get out of
it. The same earth as your earth is there at your feet imploring you;
and if you've got a grain, a jot of humanity, you must, you must, out of
the very flesh and bones of you, respond to that cry of this your
brother or your sister made as you yourself are made.

"'Well, Hapgood,' he went on, 'that's one claim the girl had on us, and
to my way of thinking it was enough. But she had a