Matters had proceeded to a desperate pass with the lad.  He had thought very fast, and he had determined that no bribe and no threat should extort a word of information from him.  His cheeks grew hot and flushed, his eyes burned, and he straightened himself in his chair as if he expected death or torture, and was prepared to meet either, as he replied: 

“I won’t tell you.”

“Is your father alive?  Tell me, you dirty little whelp?  Don’t say that you won’t do what I bid you to do again.  I have a great mind to choke you.  Tell me—­is your father alive?”

“I won’t tell you, if you kill me.”

The wheedling had failed; the threatening had failed.  Then Mr. Belcher assumed the manner of a man whose motives had been misconstrued, and who wished for information that he might do a kind act to the lad’s father.

“I should really like to help your father, and if he is poor, money would do him a great deal of good.  And here is the little boy who does not love his father well enough to get money for him, when he can have it and welcome!  The little boy is taken care of.  He has plenty to eat, and good clothes to wear, and lives in a fine house, but his poor father can take care of himself.  I think such a boy as that ought to be ashamed of himself.  I think he ought to kneel down and say his prayers.  If I had a boy who could do that, I should be sorry that he’d ever been born.”

Harry was proof against this mode of approach also, and was relieved, because he saw that Mr. Belcher was baffled.  His instincts were quick, and they told him that he was the victor.  In the meantime Mr. Belcher was getting hot.  He had closed the door of his room, while a huge coal fire was burning in the grate.  He rose and opened the door.  Harry watched the movement, and descried the grand staircase beyond his persecutor, as the door swung back.  He had looked into the house while passing, during the previous week, and knew the relations of the staircase to the entrance on the avenue.  His determination was instantaneously made, and Mr. Belcher was conscious of a swift figure that passed under his arm, and was half down the staircase before he could move or say a word.  Before he cried “stop him!” Harry’s hand was on the fastening of the door, and when he reached the door, the boy was half across the street.

He had calculated on smoothing over the rough places of the interview, and preparing a better report of the visit of the lad’s friends on the other side of the avenue, but the matter had literally slipped through his fingers.  He closed the door after the retreating boy, and went back to his room without deigning to answer the inquiries that were excited by his loud command to “stop him.”