“I think—­I dunno—­but I think, sir, she might be wantin’ to enter me for a orphlan.  My pa, sir, was knocked down an’ killed by a motor-car.  It was in the early days,” pursued Tilda, desperate now and aghast at her own invention.  The lies seemed to spring to her lips full grown.  “Pa was a stableman, sir, at Buckin’am Palace, and often and often I’ve ’eard ’im tell mother what’d be the end of ’im.  He ’d seen it in a dream.  And mother, she was a stewardess in a Sou’-Western boat that got cut in two last year.  Maybe you read of it in the papers?”

Tears by this time filled the child’s eyes.  She was casting about to invent a last dying speech for her mother, when Doctor Glasson interrupted.

“If your aunt wishes to place you here, it might perhaps be managed, for a consideration.  Just now we have no room for-er—­non-paying children.  But you began by asking for Arthur Miles.”

“Surname Chandon.”

“Yes—­quite so—­Chandon.”  He picked up a pencil and a half-sheet of paper from the desk, and wrote the name.  “Born at Kingsand—­I think you said Kingsand?  Do you happen to know where Kingsand is?  In what county, for instance?”

But Tilda had begun to scent danger again, she hardly knew why, and contented herself with shaking her head.

“Someone wants to see him.  Who?”

“She’s—­an invalid,” Tilda admitted.

“Not your aunt?”

“She’s a—­a friend of my aunt’s.”

Doctor Glasson pulled out a watch and compared it with the clock on the mantelshelf.  While he did so Tilda stole a look up at his face, and more than ever it seemed to her to resemble a double trap—­its slit of a mouth constructed to swallow anything that escaped between nose and chin.

“Your aunt is far from punctual.  You are sure she means to call?”

“Sure,” answered Tilda still hardily. “‘Twelve-thirty’ was her last words when she left me at the doctor’s—­my ‘ip bein’ ’urt, sir, through tumblin’ out of a nomnibus, three weeks ago.  But you never can depend on ’er to a few minutes up ’an down.  She gets into the streets, watchin’ the fashions, an’ that carries ’er away.  P’r’aps, sir, I ’d better go back into the street and ’ave a look for her.”

“I think you had better wait here for her,” said Doctor Glasson, shutting his lips with a snap.  “There are some picture-books in the drawing-room.”

He led the way.  The drawing-room lay at the back of the house—­an apartment even more profoundly depressing than the one she had left.  Its one important piece of furniture was a circular table of rosewood standing in the centre of the carpet under a brass gaselier, of which the burnish had perished in patches; and in the centre of the table stood a round-topped glass case containing a stuffed kestrel, with a stuffed lark prostrate under its talons and bleeding vermilion wax.  Around this ornament were disposed, as the Doctor had promised, a number of albums and illustrated books, one of which he chose and placed it in her hands, at the same time bringing forward one of a suite of rosewood chairs ranged with their backs to the walls.  He motioned her to be seated.