"'Oy do want Fate," repeated the boy. Two other women had now come round him, and also a man. "It don't seem no way canny like, to hear him going on like that," said one of the group. "And did yer h'ever see sech a skin, and sech 'air? I don't b'lieve a bit that he's a real flesh-and-blood child." A coarse red-faced woman pushed this speaker away. "Shame on yer, Kate Flarherty; the child ain't nothink uncanny. He's jest a baby boy. Bless us! I 'ad a little 'un wid 'air as yaller as he. You ha' got lost, and run away. Ain't that it, dear little baby boy?" This woman, for all her red face, had a kind voice, and it won little Roy at once. "Will 'oo take me to Fate?" he said; and he went up to the woman, and put his little hand in hers. She gave almost a scream when the little hand touched her; but, catching him in her arms, and straining him to her breast, she left the gin-palace at once. CHAPTER SEVEN. Warden spent all that night looking for Roy. He went to the police courts; he got detectives even to his aid. By the morning advertisements were placarded about, and rewards were offered for the missing child. He did all that could be done, and was assured by the police that whoever had stolen little Roy away would now certainly bring him back. Warden was a carpenter by trade. He was engaged now over a job which was to be finished by a given time, and which would, when completed, pay him handsomely. He had engaged to have it done by this date, and he was a man who had never yet failed in his appointments. But for all that he came home that morning, and never thought of going out again to work. His whole heart, and soul, and energies were concentrated, waiting and listening for a little voice, for the sight of a dear golden head, the return of the blue-eyed boy who was his own, and whom now that he had lost, he knew, indeed, to be bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. So near, so precious had little Roy become, that without him it would be agony to live. Warden went home, and saw on the floor some of the scattered fragments of his torn essay. The pieces he had been laboriously trying to put together when Faith had come to him with the news that little Roy had ran away, still lay on the table. In the grate were some burnt-out ashes; the room was untidy--dusty. It had not been touched since last night. It was Faith's duty to make this room ready for breakfast; and, as a rule, Warden would have been angry with her for its present state of neglect; but this morning he said nothing, only when his eyes rested on the torn pieces of the essay he uttered a groan, and, stooping down, he picked them all up and put them in the grate. There he set fire to them. When they had been reduced to a few white ashes he sat down on the horse-hair sofa and wondered when Faith would appear. She came in presently from the inner room, and Warden roused himself to say, in a new and wonderfully kind tone: