There is a deep-seated prejudice against the upper ten thousand in the matter of family secrets. They are supposed to possess a large number of these awkward chronicles, and they are all supposed to be scandals. Aristocratic circles are supposed to be very much exposed to the danger of catching a family secret, a disease which is contagious, and is passed on from one family to another with surprising readiness. They are supposed also to be continually engaged in hushing up, hiding away, sending accomplices and servants cognizant of certain transactions to America and the Antipodes, even dropping them into dungeons. They are believed to be always trying to forget the last scandal but one, while they are destroying the proofs of the last scandal. For my own part, while admitting the contagion of the disorder, I would submit that an earl is no more liable to it than an alderman, a baron no more than a butcher. Middle-class families are always either going up or going down. With those which are going up there is an immense quantity of things to be forgotten. We wipe out with a sponge a deplorable great-aunt, we look the other way when we pass her grave; we agree to forget a whole family of cousins; we do not wish ourselves to be remembered more than, say, thirty years back; we desire that no inquiry, other than general, shall be made into our origins. In a word--if we may compress so great a discovery in a single sentence--the middle class--the great middle class--backbone, legs, brain, and tongue, as we all know, of the country--the class to which we all, or nearly all, belong--is really the home and haunt of the family secret. This secret, however, was not in the ordinary run--not those which excitable actresses pour into the ears of physicians. Moreover, if the theory was true, it was a secret, Richard reflected, as much of the doctor's as of the lady's. And, again, since adoption became substitution, although the young doctor may have assisted in the former, the old doctor might not be anxious for the story to get about now that it meant the latter. Here, however, were the facts as related by Alice herself. An unknown lady, according to the doctor's statement, called upon him and stated that she was anxious to adopt a child in place of her own, which she had just lost by death. This was early in February, 1874. The lady stated further that she wanted a child about fifteen months of age, light-haired, blue-eyed. (The child she adopted was thirteen months of age.) (Did the child die in Birmingham? As the lady was apparently passing through, did the child die at a hotel?) Dr. Steele called upon Alice, then in great poverty and distress, and asked her if she would let the child be adopted, or whether she would suffer it to go into the workhouse. She chose the former alternative, and accepted the sum of fifty pounds for her child. The money was paid in five-pound notes. She did not know the numbers.