“Oh, I don’t know,” he said feebly.  “Perhaps he does not know where you are.  And I dare say, if he saw the child——­”

“The child?” echoed the woman bitterly.  “That’s just the worst of it!”

Rainham sighed, forced again to acknowledge his lower standing in the wisdom of the world.  He would have given a great deal to be able to get up and go.

“Then you don’t want me to employ a detective, or to advertise, or—­or to make an appeal to the editor of the Outcry?”

Mrs. Crichton seemed to welcome the opportunity afforded by this direct questioning.

“No,” she said, “I think it would be better not.  I don’t want to seem ungrateful, sir—­and I’m sure I thank you very, very much for all you have done for me—­but I think you had better take no more trouble about it.  If I can get work I shall do all right.”

In spite of the girl’s evident attempt to pull herself together, her voice was less brave than her words, and they conveyed but little assurance to the listener.  He shrugged his shoulders somewhat impatiently:  the interview was beginning to tell upon his nerves.

“Of course, it’s for you to decide, and I suppose you have thought it well out, and have good reason for this alteration of purpose.  But when you talk about work——?”

He finished his sentence with a note of inquiry and a half apologetic glance at her slight form and frail, white fingers.

“I haven’t always been a model,” she explained with some dignity.  “Would to God I never had!  I can sew better than most, and I can work a type-machine.  That’s what I used to do before he came.  But type-writing work isn’t so easy to get as it was, and I am out of practice.”

It occurred to him for a moment to ask the girl whether she could remember sitting for Mr. Lightmark, but he felt that Dick might resent the introduction of his name; and, remembering that she had told him that, for a time, before her health gave way, her artist patrons had been numerous, he dismissed the idea as not likely to be profitable.

As they spoke, she with her mournful eyes turned on Rainham’s sympathetic face, he absently following the movements of the child as it laboriously raised a small edifice of gravel-stones on the seat between them, neither of them noticed the severely correct figure in the frock-coat and immaculate hat who passed close behind with observant eyeglass fixed upon the little group, and with an air which, after the first flush of open-mouthed surprise, was eloquently expressive of regretful indignation and the highest motives.

Charles Sylvester continued his walk for a distance of about fifty paces, and then seated himself in a position to command a view of the persons in whom he was interested.

“I don’t like watching Rainham like this,” he said to himself; “but it’s a duty which I owe to society.”

That the man was Rainham was as obvious as that the woman he was talking to was of a far lower rank in life than his own.  And then there was the child!