The idea tickled him with a promise of future “copy”—­of a story with farcical complications, or even a dramatic ending, in which the baby, adopted by him, should turn out to be somebody’s stolen offspring.  He lifted the little image that had suggested these fancies, carefully laid it on his table, went to bed, and presently forgot it all in slumber.

In the morning his good-humor and interest in it revived to the extent of writing on a slip of paper, “Good-morning!  Thank you—­I’ve slept very well,” putting the slip in the doll’s jointed arms, and leaving it in a sitting posture outside his door when he left his room.  When he returned late at night it was gone.

But it so chanced that, a few days later, owing to press of work on the “Informer,” he was obliged to forego his usual Sunday holiday out of town, and that morning found him, while the bells were ringing for church, in his room with a pile of manuscript and proof before him.  For these were troublous days in San Francisco; the great Vigilance Committee of ’56 was in session, and the offices of the daily papers were thronged with eager seekers of news.  Such affairs, indeed, were not in the functions of the assistant editor, nor exactly to his taste; he was neither a partisan of the so-called Law and Order Party, nor yet an enthusiastic admirer of the citizen Revolutionists known as the Vigilance Committee, both extremes being incompatible with his habits of thought.  Consequently he was not displeased at this opportunity of doing his work away from the office and the “heady talk” of controversy.

He worked on until the bells ceased and a more than Sabbath stillness fell upon the streets.  So quiet was it that once or twice the conversation of passing pedestrians floated up and into his window, as of voices at his elbow.

Presently he heard the sound of a child’s voice singing in subdued tone, as if fearful of being overheard.  This time he laid aside his pen—­it certainly was no delusion!  The sound did not come from the open window, but from some space on a level with his room.  Yet there was no contiguous building as high.

He rose and tried to open his door softly, but it creaked, and the singing instantly ceased.  There was nothing before him but the bare, empty hall, with its lathed and plastered partitions, and the two smaller rooms, unfinished like his own, on either side of him.  Their doors were shut; the one at his right hand was locked, the other yielded to his touch.

For the first moment he saw only the bare walls of the apparently empty room.  But a second glance showed him two children—­a boy of seven and a girl of five—­sitting on the floor, which was further littered by a mattress, pillow, and blanket.  There was a cheap tray on one of the trunks containing two soiled plates and cups and fragments of a meal.  But there was neither a chair nor table nor any other article of furniture in the room.  Yet he was struck by the fact that, in spite of this poverty of surrounding, the children were decently dressed, and the few scattered pieces of luggage in quality bespoke a superior condition.