“Bless yer!  I don’t know,” replied Tony; “I weren’t much bigger nor her when mother died, and I’ve found myself ever since.  I never had any father.”

“Found yourself!” repeated the old man, absently.

“Ah, it’s not bad in the summer,” said Tony, more earnestly than before:  “and I could find for the little ’un easy enough.  I sleep anywhere, in Covent Garden sometimes, and the parks—­anywhere as the p’lice ’ill let me alone.  You won’t go to give her up to them p’lice, will you now, and she so pretty?”

He spoke in a beseeching tone, and old Oliver looked down upon him through his spectacles, with a closer survey than he had given to him before.  The boy’s face was pale and meagre, with an unboyish sharpness about it, though he did not seem more than nine or ten years old.  His glittering eyes were filled with tears, and his colourless lips quivered.  He wiped away the tears roughly upon the ragged sleeve of his jacket.

“I never were such a baby before,” said Tony, “only she is such a nice little thing, and such a tiny little ’un.  You’ll keep her, master, won’t you? or give her up to me?”

“Ay, ay!  I’ll take care of her,” answered Oliver, “till her mother comes back for her.  She’ll come pretty soon, I know.  But she wants her supper now, doesn’t she?”

He stooped down to bring his face nearer to the child’s, and she raised her hand to it, and stroked his cheek with her warm, soft fingers.

“Beppo wants his supper, too,” she said, in a clear, shrill, little voice, which penetrated easily through old Oliver’s deafened hearing.

“And Beppo shall have some supper as well as the little woman,” he answered.  “I’ll put the shutters up now, and leave the door ajar, and the gas lit for mother to see when she comes back; and if mother shouldn’t come back to night, the little woman will sleep in my bed, won’t she?”

“Dolly’s to be a good girl till mammy comes back,” said the child, plaintively, and holding harder by Beppo’s ear.

“Let me put the shutters up, master,” cried Tony, eagerly; “I won’t charge you nothink, and I’ll just look round in the morning to see how you’re getting along.  She is such a very little thing.”

The shutters were put up briskly, and then Tony took a long, farewell gaze of the old man and the little child, but he could not offer to touch either of them.  He glanced at his hands, and Oliver did the same; but they both shook their heads.

“I’ll have a wash in the morning afore I come,” he said, nodding resolutely; “good-bye, guv’ner; goodbye, little ’un.”

Old Oliver went in, leaving his door ajar, and his gas lit, as he had said.  He fed the hungry child with bread and butter, and used up his half-pennyworth of milk, which he bought for himself every evening.  Then he lifted her on to his knee, with Beppo in her arms, and sat for a long while waiting.  The little head nodded, and Dolly sat up, unsteadily striving hard to keep awake; but at last she let Beppo drop to the floor, while she herself fell upon the old man’s breast, and lay there without moving.  It chimed eleven o’clock at last, and Oliver knew it was of no use to watch any longer.