“Well, I mustn’ detain you . . .  This Arthur Miles Chandon—­he’s not a friend of yours by any chance?”

“He’s a—­sort of connection,” said Tilda.  “You know ’im, p’r’aps?”

“Dear me, no!”

“Oh,”—­the child, without intending it, achieved a fine irony—­ “I thought you seemed interested.  Well, so long! and thank you again—­ there’s a tram stoppin’ at the corner!  Come along, ’Dolph!”

She was not—­she had said it truthfully—­by any means in trouble just yet.  On the contrary, after long deprivation she was tasting life again, and finding it good.  The streets of this Bursfield suburb were far from suggestive of the New Jerusalem—­a City of which, by the way, Tilda had neither read nor heard.  They were, in fact, mean and squalid, begrimed with smoke and imperfectly scavenged.  But they were, at least, populous, and to Tilda the faces in the tram and on the pavements wore, each and all, a friendly—­almost an angelic—­glow.  The tram-car rolled along like a celestial chariot trailing clouds of glory, and ’Dolph, running beside it and threading his way in and out between the legs of the passers-by, was a hound of heaven in a coat effluent of gold.  Weariness would come, but as yet her body felt no weariness, buoyed upon a spirit a-tiptoe for all adventure.

The tram reached the iron bridge and drew up.  She descended, asked the conductor to direct her to Holy Innocents, and was answered with a jerk of the thumb.

It stood, in fact, just beyond the bridge, with a high brick wall that turned off the street at right angles and overhung the towpath of the canal.  Although in architecture wholly dissimilar, the building put her in mind of the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, and her spirits sank for a moment.  Its facade looked upon the street over a strip of garden crowded with dingy laurels.  It contained a depressingly large number of windows, and it seemed to her that they were at once bare and dirty.  Also, and simultaneously, it occurred to her that she had no notion what step to take next, nor how, if she rang the bell, to explain herself.  She temporised therefore; whistled to ’Dolph, and turned aside down the steps leading to the towpath.  She would con the lie of the land before laying siege—­the strength of the castle before summoning the defence.

The castle was patently strong—­strong enough to excuse any disheartenment.  Scarcely a window pierced its narrow butt-end, four stories high, under which the steps wound.  It ended just where they met the towpath, and from its angle sprang a brick wall dead-blank, at least twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ninety yards along the straight line of the path.  Across the canal a row of unkempt cottage gardens sloped to the water, the most of them fenced from the brink of it with decayed palings, a few with elder bushes and barbed wire to fill up the gaps, while at least two ended in moraines of old meat tins and shards of crockery.  And between