By this time the elfin child had eaten up all her “bread and butter with sugar on it,” and had drank up all her milk, and seemed satisfied—for the time being, at least. Harcourt began to prepare his own breakfast. He heard his neighbor in the next room preparing hers. “I will speak to Annie before I go to work,” he said to himself, as he went about his task. When his breakfast of coffee, bread, butter and chops was on the table, he turned to the child, and said: “Now, then, would you like to sit up to the table and have some breakfast with me?” “Oh, yes; please! What you did give me was awful good, but it only stayed my stomach. I don’t think I ever got so hungry again so soon after eating in all my born days.” “Come, then,” he said, as he lifted her up, folded the tattered wrap more closely around her, sat her in a chair and pushed the chair to the table. He helped the child first. “She must have been half famished,” he said to himself, as he noticed the avidity with which she consumed the food placed before her; for he did not know that she had but recently recovered from a long and severe illness and had the appetite of a healthy convalescent. “Well, I must leave her in the care of Annie to-day. Our Annie will be able to get more information out of her in one hour than I could in a year,” he reflected. Before he had finished his meal he heard the thumper-thumper-thumper-thumper of his neighbor’s indefatigable sewing machine in full blast. As soon, therefore, as he had risen from the table and put his room in order, and given the child some old picture papers to look at, he thought he would go and see Annie. He felt the strongest possible temptation to stay home that day to investigate the interesting mystery—to him—of this child picked up in the streets of New York, who could talk of nothing else, and of no one else, but Roma, Dr. Shaw and Mr. Merritt, whose homes were in Western Maryland or in Washington City; but he did not yield to that temptation. He had laid down for himself an iron-cast rule of life, to go daily to his hard labor, as though, indeed, he were under prison discipline for penal servitude. So he resisted the temptation to stay at home, and resolved to leave the child and the solution of the problem to his neighbor for this day. Then he went to her door and knocked and called. The sound of the sewing machine stopped in an instant, and the pleasant voice of the woman demanded: “Well, what is it, Mr. William? What can I do for you?” “Come here, dear heart, I wish to speak to you at once,” Harcourt said. Annie started up and came and opened the door. “What is it, Mr. William?” she inquired again. “Oh, Annie, I have picked up a wretched child out of the street—out of the gutter, I might say—under our very doorstep here,” Harcourt replied. “A child! A baby?” exclaimed Annie, staring. “Yes!—No!—that is, a little girl of about five or six or seven years old. I am no judge of children’s ages.” “Lost?”