We could do no less than agree with him, and thank him for his frank and honest manner of meeting us.  It was arranged that I should send over the writing-materials from my lodgings; and, to my unutterable joy and relief, it was also readily acknowledged that the poor little orphan boy could find no fitter refuge than my old arms were longing to offer him, and no safer protection for the night than my roof could give.  Trottle hastened away up-stairs, as actively as if he had been a young man, to fetch the child down.

And he brought him down to me without another moment of delay, and I went on my knees before the poor little Mite, and embraced him, and asked him if he would go with me to where I lived?  He held me away for a moment, and his wan, shrewd little eyes looked sharp at me.  Then he clung close to me all at once, and said: 

“I’m a-going along with you, I am—­and so I tell you!”

For inspiring the poor neglected child with this trust in my old self, I thanked Heaven, then, with all my heart and soul, and I thank it now!

I bundled the poor darling up in my own cloak, and I carried him in my own arms across the road.  Peggy was lost in speechless amazement to behold me trudging out of breath up-stairs, with a strange pair of poor little legs under my arm; but, she began to cry over the child the moment she saw him, like a sensible woman as she always was, and she still cried her eyes out over him in a comfortable manner, when he at last lay fast asleep, tucked up by my hands in Trottle’s bed.

“And Trottle, bless you, my dear man,” said I, kissing his hand, as he looked on:  “the forlorn baby came to this refuge through you, and he will help you on your way to Heaven.”

Trottle answered that I was his dear mistress, and immediately went and put his head out at an open window on the landing, and looked into the back street for a quarter of an hour.

That very night, as I sat thinking of the poor child, and of another poor child who is never to be thought about enough at Christmas-time, the idea came into my mind which I have lived to execute, and in the realisation of which I am the happiest of women this day.

“The executor will sell that House, Trottle?” said I.

“Not a doubt of it, ma’am, if he can find a purchaser.”

“I’ll buy it.”

I have often seen Trottle pleased; but, I never saw him so perfectly enchanted as he was when I confided to him, which I did, then and there, the purpose that I had in view.

To make short of a long story—­and what story would not be long, coming from the lips of an old woman like me, unless it was made short by main force!—­I bought the House.  Mrs. Bayne had her father’s blood in her; she evaded the opportunity of forgiving and generous reparation that was offered her, and disowned the child; but, I was prepared for that, and loved him all the more for having no one in the world to look to, but me.