“Hi’ll fat up, ’ere, Hi swears Hi will,” Maria interrupted hopefully.  “Hi’m certain to fat up.”

“Yes, yes,” said Anna, “I am certain that she will be very fat.  She will not have so much to do and will have much to eat.  She shall fat up at once.”  She spoke with honest earnestness.  Could leanness be against the law, too, here?

And M’riar, also, had understood exactly what he meant when he had said she was too ignorant.  “An’ Hi’m that quick to learn!” she said.  “You cawn’t himagine!  W’y, ’yn’t Hi halmost learnt me letters off from bundle carts an’ ’oardings?  M, he, hay, t—­that spells ‘beef.’  The bobby on hour beat, ‘e told me, an’ Hi ’yn’t fergot a mite.  T, haych, he, hay, t, r, he, spells ‘show.’  ’E told me that, too.  Hi ’yn’t one as would st’y hignorant, Hi ’yn’t.”

“Fer Gawd’s sake!” said the officer, entirely nonplussed by this display of the girl’s erudition.  “Say—­well—­now—­come here, Bill!” He beckoned to another man in blue and shiny buttons.  “Spell them words ag’in, Miss, won’t you?” he implored.

Anna looked at him reproachfully.  “No, no,” she said, and made him feel ashamed with her big eyes, “please, sir, not.  It is not funny—­not for us.  Please, please do not send our M’riarrr back to England.  It was her love which brought her with us.  Real love.  You would not punish any one for being truly loving, eh?”

Subdued and made, again, uneasy by her lovely eyes, the man did not complete the exposition of the joke to the newcomer, but took refuge in an attitude of most regretful, but impregnable officialism.  “I ain’t got a word to say about it, Miss,” he hurried to assure the eyes.  “Law’s law, and law says that the likes of her has got to be sent back.  The only way that you could keep her here would be to put up bonds to guarantee th’ gover’ment against her goin’ on th’ town or anything like that.”

She did not understand him in the least.  “What is it that you mean?” she asked.

Laboriously he made things clear to her, Herr Kreutzer helping and coming to an understanding just before she did.

“Ach!” said the old flute-player, “We cannot.  We have not so much.”

“Sure.  I know that,” the man replied.  “That is why I say th’ girl has got to be sent back.”

Argument proved unavailing, and, ten minutes later, poor M’riar, screaming as if red-hot irons were begrilling her most tender spots, was being led into the “pen.”

“We’ll keep her here a while,” the man explained, as he endeavored to avoid the child’s astonishingly skilful and astonishingly painful kicks.  “Maybe you can find somebody to go bond for her.  There ain’t no other way.  There really ain’t, Miss.”

During all this speech he still was under the strong influence of Anna’s wondrous eyes, else he would never have been able to articulate with such unruffled calm.  His charge was doing agonizing things to his official shins, and even pinching him just over the short ribs on his left side with a forefinger and a thumb which showed amazing strength and malice quite infernal.