“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” said Tilda, lifting the brim of her chip hat and quoting from one of Mr. Maggs’s most effective dramatic sketches.  But as the boy stared, not taking the allusion, she went on, almost in the same breath, “Is your name Arthur—­Arthur Miles?”

It seemed that he did not hear.  At any rate he still backed and edged away from her, with eyes distended—­she had seen their like in the ring, in beautiful terrified horses, but never in human creatures.

—­“Because, if you ’re Arthur Miles, I got a message for you.”

A tattered book lay on the turf at her feet.  She picked it up and held it out to him.  For a while he looked at her eyes, and from them to the book, unable to believe.  Then, with a noise like a sob, he sprang and snatched it, and hid it with a hug in the breast of his coat.

“I got a message for you,” repeated Tilda.  “There’s someone wants to see you, very bad.”

“You go away!” said the boy sullenly.  “You don’t know.  If he catches you, there’s no chance.”

Tilda had time in her distress to be astonished by his voice.  It was pure, distinct, with the tone of a sphere not hers.  Yet she recognised it.  She had heard celestial beings—­ladies and gentlemen in Maggs’s three-shilling seats—­talk in voices like this boy’s.

“I’ve took a ‘eap o’ trouble to find yer,” she said.  “An’ now I’ve done it, all depends on our gettin’ out o’ this.  Ain’t there no way? Do try to think a bit!”

The boy shook his head.

“There isn’t any way.  You let me alone, and clear.”

“He can’t do worse’n kill us,” said Tilda desperately, with a look back at the house.  “S’help me, let’s try!”

But her spirit quailed.

“He won’t kill you.  He’ll catch you, and keep you here for ever and ever.”

“We’ll try, all the same.”

Tilda shut her teeth and held out a hand—­or rather, was beginning to extend it—­when a sound arrested her.  It came from the door of the glass-house, and as she glanced towards it her heart leapt and stood still.

“’Dolph!”

Yes, it was ’Dolph, dirty, begrimed with coal; ’Dolph fawning towards her, cringing almost on his belly, but wagging his stump of a tail ecstatically.  Tilda dashed upon him.

“Oh, ’Dolph!—­how?”

The dog strangled down a bark, and ran back to the glass-house, but paused in the doorway a moment to make sure that she was following.  It was all right.  Tilda had caught the boy’s hand, and was dragging him along.  ’Dolph led them through the glass-house and down a flight of four steps to the broken door of a furnace-room.  They pushed after him.  Behind the furnace a second doorway opened upon a small coal-cellar, through the ceiling of which, in the right-hand corner, poured a circular ray of light.  The ray travelled down a moraine of broken coal, so broad at the base that it covered the whole cellar floor, but narrowing upwards and towards the manhole through which the daylight shone.