After a time he approached the boy again.

“The woman will say you are her child, and make you go back and beg for her if she gets better, will she not?”

“She doesn’t want me now.”

“How so?”

“She says, I’m too hungry, and eat all the bread away from her, and don’t get enough for us both.”

A curious expression passed across Theodore’s face as he turned away and sat down in his chair once more.  It looked like a gleam of satisfaction.  The boy, meanwhile, sat quite still, looking round the room.  He had a grave and somewhat interesting face, but that the dark eyes looked a little too keen and restless to be quite pleasant.  Still, when he smiled, and he had smiled brightly when he first saw the bread, his countenance improved; and there was, besides, something about his open forehead which redeemed the covert expression of his eye.  He was about seven years old, and precocious in quickness of a particular kind, as is very often the case with vagrant children.

Theodore’s reverie was broken at last by the arrival of his good old housekeeper, who came in, flurried and indignant, to inform him that the woman she had been in search of was no where to be found.  She had been, “she was sure,” up and down all the carriage roads, and made enquiries at all the lodges, and finally discovered that a beggar woman had passed out at one of them upwards of an hour before, very hurriedly, and indeed almost at a running pace.

Theodore glanced at the child, but his countenance never changed.  Only he sat eying the housekeeper as she spoke, apparently indifferent to the result.  The housekeeper now began to ejaculate 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.”