In such a confusion of people and sounds it is not strange that a small girl crying to herself would attract so little attention that even the big, fat policeman on that beat passed her a number of times before he noticed her, and then did not stop, as he saw that she was well dressed. At last, as she still remained crouched down in a dejected little heap, he stopped, moved as much by the thought of a little girl in his own home as from a sense of duty, with the inquiry, “Here, Sis, what’s the matter with you?” She started up at the brusque but not unkindly tone, and lifting from her sheltering arm a round and dimpled face, with wide grey eyes, now swollen and disfigured with tears, answered brokenly and in a half-frightened voice, for the policeman stood to her as the terror rather than the guardian of the law, “Oh, I don’t know what to do! I don’t know where to go!” “You don’t, eh? Well, it seems to me you are a pretty big girl to get lost; where do you live?” “I don’t live anywhere,” with a fresh sob. “That’s rather queer, not to live anywhere,” and he looked at her a trifle more sternly. “What’s your name, if you have any?” “Posey Sharpe.” “Oh, indeed,” and he glanced at the stairway before him, where a small black sign with gilt lettering on the step just above her head read, “Madam Atheldena Sharpe, “CLAIRVOYANT.” “So that was your mother, was it, who raised all that row here last night?” “No, she wasn’t my mother, but I lived with her.” “If she wasn’t, how comes it your name is the same?” “It isn’t, really, only I’ve lived with her so long that people called me that. She said I was her niece, but I wasn’t any relation at all.” He looked at the sign again, “Madam Sharpe. Well,” with a chuckle at his own witticism, “she wasn’t sharp enough to keep from being exposed. And you were the spirit child, I suppose?” Posey nodded, a very dejected-looking spirit she seemed at that moment. “Well, when she took herself off so suddenly why didn’t you go with her?” “I ran up under the roof and hid, and I didn’t know till this morning that she had gone.” “I see; and was she so good to you, and did you think so much of her that you are taking on this way?” Posey hesitated a moment. “She might have been better, and she might have been worse,” she answered with a candor of simplicity. “But I haven’t anybody else to live with, and I didn’t think she’d use me so.” “I see; it was rather rough.” There was sympathy in his tone, and even in the way he tapped his knee with his polished club.