Thus time passed, and Helen had worked out a year and a half of her sentence, and Robin was between nine and ten years of age. It was winter then; and winter was, as it ever is to all such children, his hard time. The cold, and rain, and snow of winter, are awful to the little homeless street Arabs. The need for food is much greater than in summer, and the chance of food much less. A thousand ways of earning a penny, by selling flowers or fruit; a thousand ways of pilfering, are all closed at this time of year. Then, too, the nights are so long and so dark. In summer it makes very little difference to a healthy boy where he sleeps, but in winter the case is very different; then the little limbs shiver and freeze, the insufficiently nourished body succumbs, and the young life goes out. Robin began this second winter of Helen's captivity badly. Finding himself rather a marked character with the police, and knowing that if he tried his pilfering practices much longer in his present quarters he would assuredly spend a much longer time than he had ever done before in prison, he had started off with one or two companions into the country, to secure a supply of winter roots, such as groundsel, plantain, &c., for sale. Some children, and even some men and women, did a fair business in this way, but Robin and his companions were unfortunate; in the place they went to, they found very few of the roots they desired, and on their way back to London they were overtaken by an early and violent snow-storm. Chilled, hungry, their miserable rags wet through, they found themselves on their return at night obliged to take what shelter they could obtain under an archway. In the morning Robin got up with a sharp pain in his chest, and a bad cough. In a few days the pain got better, but the cough remained; it was a miserable beginning for a severe London winter. Hitherto he had been bright and gay enough, had laughed off his hunger, had whistled away his loneliness, but now, what with starvation, cold, almost nakedness (for his rags would scarcely keep together), and a cough that seemed to take away all his small remaining strength, the brave little heart began to give way. The hard battle was becoming too much for this poor child. He used to wander about the streets, thin, pale, shivering, and into many a face did his wistful brown eyes gaze longingly, yearningly; the weaker he grew the more he craved for kindness, the more intensely he longed for Helen. Any one could have saved him then, any hand could have drawn him from the mire. Well, SOME ONE did. CHAPTER IV. _HONESTY WAS NOT THE BEST POLICY._