"Hallo," said I, "what have we here? What are you doing here?" At this moment--before the children could answer--I heard Bolton coming up the stairs. He entered the room; a bright color mounted to his cheeks as he saw the group by the fire, and me. "Hallo, Hal!" he said, with a sort of conscious laugh. "Hallo, Bolton!" said I. "Have you got a foundling hospital here?" "Oh, well, well," said he; "never mind; let 'em stay there. Do you want anything? There," said he, pulling a package of buns out of his pocket, "eat those; and when the baby gets asleep you can lay her on the bed in the other room. And there,"--to the boy,--"you read this story aloud to your sister when the baby is asleep. And now, Hal, what can I do for you? Suppose I come down into your room for awhile and talk?" He took my arm, and we went down the stairs together; and when we got into my room he shut the door and said: "The fact is Hal, I have to take care of that family--my washerwoman, you know. Poor Mrs. Molloy, she has a husband that about once a month makes a perfect devil of himself, so that the children are obliged to run and hide for fear of their lives. And then she has got the way of sending them to me, and I have to go down and attend to him." "Bless me!" said I, "why will women live with such brutes? Why don't you make her separate from him?" Bolton seated himself at my table, and leaned back in his chair, with a curious expression of countenance, very sad, yet not without a touch of humor in it. "Well, you see," he said, "the fact is, Hal, she loves him." "Well, she oughtn't to love him," said I. "May be not; but she does," said he. "She loves that poor Pat Molloy so much that to be angry with him is just like your right hand being angry with your left hand. Suppose there's a great boil on the left hand, what's the right to do about it but simply bear the suffering and wait for it to get well? That, you see, is love; and because of it, you can't get women away from their husbands. What are you going to do about it?" "But," said I, "it is perfectly absurd for a woman to cling to such a man." "Well," said Bolton, "three weeks of the month Pat Molloy is just as kind and tender a father and husband as you will find, and then by the fourth week comes around his drunken spell, and he's a devil. Now she says, 'Sure sir, it's the drink. It's not Pat at all sir; he's not himself sir.' And she waits till it's over--taking care that he doesn't kill the children. Now, shall I persuade her to let him go to the devil? Does not Jesus Christ say, 'Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost'? He said it about a basket of bread; wouldn't he say it still more about the fragments of the human soul? If she leaves Pat, where will he go to? First, to some harlot, then to murder, and the gallows--and that gets him out of the way." "Well," said I, "isn't he better out than in?"