“Which I am about to explain,” continued Miss Willoughby, with unshaken calmness. “It was at the respectable elderly person’s that I first met Miss Turner; for my darling baby having learnt to call his nurse Nungey, and taking so to her, and not taking to anybody else, and she so attached to him, that she froze my very blood by talking of Battersea Bridge in quite a meaning way, when I spoke of taking him away. Owing to this and one circumstance and another, Harry has stopped at Chelsea till he’s quite a big boy. So, of course, I very often go to see him--not that he takes to me so much as he ought to do, being so wrapped up in his Nungey. And one day, about three years ago, I went there quite promiscuous, and found Harry walking up and down before the door with a baby in his arms; and the nurse told me that she’d put an advertisement in the paper, and the very day it was inserted a lady came to her--a sweet-looking young creature, she said--and left this baby, which might be going on for twelve months old. Well, the long and the short of it is, that this was your cousin Susan’s baby; and going there off and on, I saw a good deal of your cousin. But see her as much as you would, she was so quiet and so reserved, that you never got anything like intimate with her. At first she was dressed like a lady, and she had a pretty little gold watch and chain, and many things that had cost money; but, little by little, all these disappeared, and she seemed to get very poor. One day, when I was there, it came out somehow that she was doing plain needlework for one of the great cheap outfitters’ houses in the City, and what a hard life it was, and, worse than hard--uncertain; so then, knowing there were ‘extras’ wanted for the new piece, I proposed to her that with my help she should try and get engaged. It would be much lighter work than the plain sewing, and better pay. Well, at first she was very much against it, but after a deal of persuasion she gave way, and I got her the engagement. That was full five months ago; for the piece had a long run. She had been lodging in one room at Chelsea until then, for the sake of being near her boy, and she left that lodging to come and share mine.” “And do you think she will go back to the old lodging?” “I doubt it. She seemed so uncertain, that I really don’t think she’d made up her mind where to go.” “But she is likely to have gone straight to her child!” cried Francis. “Will you give me the address of the old woman at Chelsea? Oh, I thank you so much for giving me this clue. I _must_ find my poor girl now!” The sprite’s widow opened a little portfolio and wrote an address on a scrap of paper, while Francis stood by eager to take it from her. “Do you know that there has been an advertisement appealing to my cousin, in the columns of the “Times” newspaper, a hundred times within the last two years?”