for their motions were almost inert and quite aimless.  Next, to her surprise, she perceived that, on no apparent compulsion, the boys kept with the boys in these separate wandering groups, and the girls with the girls; and further that, when two groups met and passed, no greeting, no nod of recognition, was ever exchanged.  At any rate she could detect none.  She had heard tell—­indeed, it was an article of faith among the show-children with whom she had been brought up—­that the sons and daughters of the well-to-do followed weird ways and practised discomfortable habits—­attended public worship on Sundays, for instance, walking two and two in stiff raiment.  But these children were patently very far from well-to-do.  The garments of some hung about them in rags that fell short even of Tilda’s easy standard.  The spectacle fascinated her.  For the moment it chased fear out of her mind.  She was only conscious of pity—­of pity afflicting and indefinable, far beyond her small understanding, and yet perhaps not wholly unlike that by which the great poet was oppressed as he followed his guide down through the infernal circles and spoke with their inhabitants.  The sight did her this good—­it drove out for a while, along with fear, all thought of her present situation.  She noted that the majority were in twos or threes, but that here and there a child walked solitary, and that the faces of these solitary ones were hard to discern, being bent towards the ground . . .

The door-handle rattled and called her back to terror.  She had no time to clamber down from her chair.  She was caught.

But it was a woman who entered, the same that had opened the front gate; and she carried a tray with a glass of water on it and a plate of biscuits.

“The Doctor told me as ’ow you might be ’ungry,” she explained.

“Thank you,” said Tilda.  “I—­I was lookin’ at the view.”

For an instant she thought of appealing to this stranger’s mercy.  The woman’s eyes were hard, but not unkind.  They scrutinised her closely.

“You take my advice, an’ get out o’ this quick as you can.”

The woman thumped down the tray, and made as if to leave the room with a step decisive as her speech.  At the door, however, she hesitated.

“Related to ’im?” she inquired.

“Eh?” Tilda was taken aback. “’Oo’s ’im?”

“I ’eard you tell the Doctor you wanted to see ’im.”

“An’ so I do.  But I’m no relation of ’is—­on’y a friend.”

“I was thinkin’ so.  Lawful born or come-by-chance, the child’s a little gentleman, an’ different from the others.  Blood al’ays comes out, don’t it?”

“I s’pose so.”

Tilda, still perched on her chair, glanced out at the children in the yard.

“You won’t see ‘im out there.  He’s in the shed at the end o’ the kitchen garden, cleanin’ the boots.  If you’ve got anything good to tell ‘im, an’ ’ll promise not to be five minutes, I might give you a run there while the Doctor’s finishin’ his dinner in his study.  Fact is,” added this strange woman, “the child likes to be alone, an’ sometimes I lets ’im slip away there—­when he’s good, or the Doctor’s been extra ’ard with ’im.”