"Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after," shrilled Mrs. Perkins to us--Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street. "But it's only what was to be looked for, and I guess it'll be a lesson to some. You can't expect no better end than that," perorated Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green eyes snapped with electric malice, "you can't expect no better end than that to sech _brazen_ immorality!" "My God," groaned Maltby, as we sped away, "How they have enjoyed it all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them you'd found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world! "By the way," he added, as we turned once more into the dignified breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, "what'll you do with the homely little brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?" The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes. "Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her relatives don't claim her, she'll stay on here with me." "Hum. Bravo.... About two weeks," said Maltby Phar. THE SECOND CHAPTER I IT was not Susan who left me at the end of two weeks; it was Mrs. Parrot. Maltby had departed within three days, hastening perforce to editorial duties in New York. He then edited, with much furtive groaning to sympathetic friends, the _Garden Exquisite_, a monthly magazine _de luxe_, devoted chiefly to advertising matter, and to photographs taken--by request of far-seeing wives and daughters--at the country clubs and on the country estates of our minor millionaires. For a philosophical anarch, rather a quaint occupation! Yet one must live.... Maltby, however, had threatened a return as soon as possible, "to look over the piteous _débâcle_." There was no probability that Mrs. Parrot would ever return. "You cannot expect me," maintained Mrs. Parrot, "to wait on the child of a murdering suicide. Especially," she added, "when he was nothing but a common sort of man to begin with. I'm as sorry for that poor little creature as anybody in New Haven; but there are places for such." That was her ultimatum. My reply was two weeks' notice, and a considerable monetary gift to soften the blow. Hillhouse Avenue, in general, so far as I could discover, rather sympathized with Mrs. Parrot. She at once obtained an excellent post, becoming housekeeper for the Misses Carstairs, spinster sisters of incredible age, who lived only two doors from me in a respectable mansion whose portico resembled an Egyptian tomb. Wandering freshmen from the Yale campus frequently mistook it for the home office of one of the stealthier secret societies.