Here Mr. Mortimer, warm to his work, let out a laugh so blood-curdling that Old Jubilee bolted the length of his rope.

“The boat!” gasped the woman.

“Eh?”

Mr. Mortimer turned and saw the boat glide by the bank like a shadow; heard the thud of Old Jubilee’s hoofs, and sprang in pursuit.  The woman ran with him.

But the freshest horse cannot bolt far with a 72-feet monkey-boat dragging on his shoulders, and at the end of fifty yards, the towrope holding, Old Jubilee dropped to a jog-trot.  The woman caught her breath as Mr. Mortimer jumped aboard and laid hold of the tiller.  But still she ran beside panting.

“You won’t tell him?”

Mr. Mortimer waved a hand.

“And—­and you’ll hide ’em—­for he’s bound to come askin’—­you’ll hide ’em if you can—­”

Mr. Mortimer heard, but could not answer for the moment, the steerage claiming all his attention.  When he turned towards the bank she was no longer there.  He looked back over his shoulder.  She had come to a dead halt and stood watching, her print gown glimmering in the dusk.  And so, as the boat rounded the bend by the Brewery, he lost sight of her.

He passed a hand over his brow.

“Mysterious business,” he mused; “devilish mysterious.  On the face of it looks as if my friend Smiles, not content with self-help in its ordinary forms, has been helping himself to orphans!  Must speak to him about it.”

He pondered, gazing up the dim waterway, and by-and-by broke into a chuckle.

He chuckled again twenty minutes later, when, having stabled Old Jubilee, he crossed the yard to sup and to season the meal with a relation of his adventure.

“Such an encounter, my poppet!” he announced, groping his way across to the caravan, where his spouse had lit the lamp and stood in the doorway awaiting him.  “Smiles—­our ingenuous Smiles—­has decoyed, has laid me under suspicion; and of what, d’you think?  Stealing orphans!”

“Hush!” answered Mrs. Mortimer.  “They ’re here.”

“They?  Who? . . .  Not the bailiffs?  Arabella, don’t tell me it’s the bailiffs again!”

Mr. Mortimer drew back as though a snake lay coiled on the caravan steps.

“It’s not the bailiffs, Stanislas; it’s the orphans.”

“But—­but, my sweet, there must be some mistake.  I—­er—­actually, of course, I have nothing to do with any orphans whatsoever.”

“Oh, yes, you have,” his wife assured him composedly.  “They are inside here, with a yellow dog.”

While Mr. Mortimer yet reeled under this news the door of the courtyard rattled and creaked open in the darkness.  A lantern showed in the opening, and the bearer of it, catching sight of the lit caravan, approached with quick, determined strides.

“Can you inform me,” asked a high clerical voice, “where I can find Mr. Christopher Hucks?”

The stranger held his lantern high, so that its ray fell on his face, and with that Mr. Mortimer groaned and collapsed upon the lowest step, where mercifully his wife’s ample shadow spread an aegis over him.