“Harry spoke slow again:  ’I don’t know if I will be good to him, but I will try.  I will put him in as good hands as I can, educate him, and acknowledge him, if he deserves it; and I fear if you bring him up he is not likely to do so.’

“‘It is for the child’s own good, Bessie,’ said mother, eagerly.  ’You must sacrifice your own feeling, and leave him with his father, if he promises so fair.  How are we like to get him educated where we are going?  It is very hard on you, Bessie,’ said mother, coaxingly.

“I stood sulky, not knowing what to do or what to say.

“’And Mr. Hogarth will no doubt consider the hardship of your case, and make it up in some other way to you,’ mother went on to say.

“Henry looked up at mother very sharp, and then he looked at me.  Though he did not believe in my tears, he did not like to see them, for they reminded him of how I had served him before.

“‘He is quite innocent now, poor boy, quite innocent,’ said Henry; ’we must keep him so if we can,’ and he offered as much to me for my life as we had expected him to give for me and the child too; and it was so tempting that we closed with it at once, for it cost me nothing to part with a baby as was not my own.  I had had a mind to tell him, but then I knew how enraged he would have been at my trying it on with him.  Another cheat would have driven him wild, so I bade him good-bye and the child too.

“He took us on board and we sailed that night, and I never saw him or the child again.  He sent me money regular till I asked for the fifteen hundred pounds and signed a quittance for the annuity like a fool, as I told you.”

Chapter X.

Mrs. Peck’s Disappointment

Brandon had listened to this strange story of Mrs. Peck’s without interrupting her.  After she had concluded, he thought for a minute and then said——­

“Did you ever hear if the mother of the child you stole missed it?”

“How should I hear?  We sailed that day for Sydney, and we never heard nothing about it.”

“What was her name?” asked Brandon.

“I don’t know at all for certain; there was so many people in the house, that though she had been there three days, I had not asked nor had mother, but yet we must have heard it.  I fancy it was Jackson, or Johnson, or Jones, or it might be Brown, but it was a common name as there’s no recollecting.  When mother took the child first, she thought she’d never know the one from the other; but afterwards she used to say that the mother might find out the difference.  Both was much of a size, and my boy was much changed.”

“But,” said Brandon, “there might be more or fewer teeth, or a difference in the colour and length of the hair, or in the shape of the limbs, though the features and complexion might be changed by the convulsions.  Your child was probably more emaciated than the other.  A mother’s eye might have seen differences that you in your hurried examination did not.”