te in broken
sentences, "The base creature! To think that you should have taken all
this trouble, Sir! and had the child actually into the house!
and--gracious me," added she in a half whisper, "hadn't I better call
the butler, Sir; hadn't he" (nodding significantly towards the child)
"better be taken to the workhouse at once, Sir?"

"I think not," answered Theodore slowly--"not yet, I think. The truth
is, I find he's not her own child, but has been stolen; and--and--in
fact, we can send him to the workhouse to-morrow. Perhaps, after all,
the woman may come here for him. But, at any rate, there is time
enough. You see this is an odd affair; and, as the boy is not _hers_,
we don't know who he may not turn out to be some day." And, as
Theodore thus concluded his sentence, he got up and looked at the old
housekeeper with a smile--a melancholy one it is true, but still it
was a smile--the first that had been seen on his face since his
terrible bereavement.

And the faithful servant was so much pleased that she forgot every
thing else in a desire to keep up the interest that had lured her
young master so unaccountably from his misery.

"Well, to be sure, Sir, what you say's quite right, and we can make
the poor thing comfortable for to-night, and then you can do as you
please to-morrow. Shall I take him with me, Sir, and make him clean,
while you dine? I can borrow some tidy clothes from the bailiff's
wife, I dare say; and after he's made respectable, you can see him
again, Sir, if you think proper."

This proposition was more grateful to Theodore's mind than he cared to
acknowledge to himself. Indeed he had no clear ideas of his feelings
about the little accident that had interrupted the dismal course of
his life; and he studiously avoided questioning himself too closely.
Only there came across him, every now and then, a sensation that there
was some special providence about it all, and that there was some
mysterious connection between this adventure and the words of the
apparitions who had spoken to him in the morning.

But "let be, let us see what will happen," was the ruling feeling, and
as he felt less miserable than usual, he did not wish to disturb the
pleasing dream by enquiries, why?

After his solitary dinner, as he was seated alone in his arm chair, he
was relapsing fast into his usual unhappy state of mind, for this was
at all times the most trying part of the day to him, when a knock at
the door aroused