n't rightly know," replied Dick. "I've 'eerd it said that the old
gentleman recognised him as a beggar boy 'e'd tuck a fancy to an' putt
to school long ago; but Billy didn't like the school, it seems, an'
runn'd away--w'ich I don't regard as wery surprisin'--an' Mr Durant
could never find out where 'e'd run to. That's how I 'eerd the story,
but wot's true of it I dun know."

"There goes the dinner-bell!" exclaimed Jack Shales, rising with
alacrity on hearing a neighbouring clock strike noon.

Jerry rose with a sigh, and remarked, as he shook the ashes out of his
pipe, and put it into his waistcoat pocket, that his appetite had quite
left him; that he didn't believe he was fit for more than two chickens
at one meal, whereas he had seen the day when he would have thought
nothing of a whole leg of mutton to his own cheek.

"Ah," remarked Dick Moy, "Irish mutton, I s'pose. Well, I don't know
'ow you feels, but I feels so hungry that I could snap at a ring-bolt;
and I know of a lot o' child'n, big an' small, as won't look sweet on
their daddy if he keeps 'em waitin' for dinner, so come along, mates."

Saying this, Dick and his friends left the buoy-store, and walked
smartly off to their several places of abode in the town.

In a darkened apartment of that same town sat Nora Jones, the very
personification of despair, on a low stool, with her head resting on the
side of a poor bed. She was alone, and perfectly silent; for some
sorrows, like some thoughts, are too deep for utterance. Everything
around her suggested absolute desolation. The bed was that in which not
long ago she had been wont to smooth the pillow and soothe the heart of
her old grandmother. It was empty now. The fire in the rusty grate had
been allowed to die out, and its cold grey ashes strewed the hearth.
Among them lay the fragments of a black bottle. It would be difficult
to say what it was in the peculiar aspect of these fragments that
rendered them so suggestive, but there was that about them which
conveyed irresistibly the idea that the bottle had been dashed down
there with the vehemence of uncontrollable passion. The little table
which used to stand at the patient's bedside was covered with a few
crumbs and fragments of a meal that must, to judge from their state and
appearance, have been eaten a considerable time ago; and the confusion
of the furniture, as well as the dust that covered everything, was
strangely out of keeping with the ch