d our talking any more about it. Come
in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. I must go back to my
books now."

She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter.
Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some
murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.

Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward
beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless,
ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the
glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with
increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner.
At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet,
and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.

"Bring everything in!" she called to the boy, and helped out his
apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.

Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets
from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from
without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the
oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.

"I think you may go home now," she said to him, with the laconic
abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. "You have a home, haven't
you?"

Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made
about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job,
he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion
he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.

"Got a mother?" she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.

"And do you think yourself better than she is?"

The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious
perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he
grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the
fell acuteness of the Dials. "I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't," he answered,
in swift, rasping accents. "She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a
fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--" "Go home!" she bade him,
peremptorily--and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the
shop.

Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book--the wretched
day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history--but loitered
about in the wa