these containing banks wound the canal, shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar.  In the cottage gardens not a soul was at work, nor, by their appearance, had a soul worked in them for years past.  The canal, too, was deserted, save for one long monkey-boat, black as Charon’s barge, that lay moored to a post on the towpath, some seventy-odd yards up stream, near where the wall of the Orphanage ended.  Beyond this, and over a line of ragged thorns, the bulk of a red-brick Brewery—­its roof crowned with a sky-sign—­closed the view.

The monkey-boat lay with her stem down-stream, and her after-part—­her habitable quarters—­covered by a black tarpaulin.  A solitary man was at work shovelling coal out of her middle hold into a large metal bucket.  As Tilda hobbled towards him he hoisted the full bucket on his shoulders, staggered across the towpath with it, and shot its contents into a manhole under the brick wall.  Tilda drew near and came to a halt, watching him.

“Afternoon,” said the man, beginning to shovel again.

“Afternoon,” responded Tilda.

He was a young man—­she could detect this beneath his mask of coal dust.  He wore a sack over his shoulders, and a black sou’wester hat with a hind-flap that fell low over his neck.  But she liked the look in his eyes, though the rims of them were red and the brows caked with grit.  She liked his voice, too.  It sounded friendly.

“Is this the Orph’nige?  What they call ’Oly Innercents?” she asked.

“That’s so,” the young coalheaver answered.  “Want to get in?”

“I do an’ I don’t,” said Tilda.

“Then take my advice an’ don’t.”

He resumed his shovelling, and Tilda watched him for a while.

“Nice dorg,” said he, breaking off and throwing an affable nod towards Godolphus who, having attracted no attention by flinging himself on the grass with a lolling tongue and every appearance of fatigue, was now filling up the time in quest of a flea.  “No breed, but he has points.  Where did you pick him up?”

“He belongs to a show.”

“Crystal Pallus?”

“And,” pursued Tilda, “I was wonderin’ if you’d look after him while I step inside?”

She threw back her head, and the man whistled.

“You’re a trustin’ one, I must say!”

“You’d never be mean enough to make off with ‘im, an’ I won’t believe it of you,” spoke up Tilda boldly.

“Eh?  I wasn’ talkin of the dorg,” he explained.  “I was meanin’ the Orph’nage.  By all accounts ‘tisn’ so easy to get in—­an’ ’tis a sight harder to get out.”

“I’ve got to get in,” urged Tilda desperately.

“I’ve a message for someone inside.  His name’s Arthur Miles Chandon.”

The young coalheaver shook his head.

“I don’t know ‘im,” he said.  “I’m new to this job, an’ they don’t talk to me through the coal-’ole.  But you seem a well-plucked one, and what with your crutch—­How did you come by it?”