“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now? The gal came to her mother in her trouble--that was all it mattered to me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now--old Patterson, drat him--if he could ever get a word out of her.” “I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.” She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech. “The deuce and the devil! O you” (sanguine) “spark! I don’t want your money. I believe you’re after mine. O I’ll rouse the neighbourhood if you don’t get out of this! A pretty gentleman, on my sinful word, to think to come and bleed his poor old grandmother to pay for his pop-lollies and opera-boxes! O burst my lungs if I don’t have the police on you! O the deuce get out!” She was whipping herself to a frenzy, real or diplomatic. My efforts to quiet her were only so much oil on her old smouldering fire. She began to scream pipingly, and to drive me outward with vicious feeble blows. In the end, baffled and disappointed, I had to make an ignominious exit. The door slammed and the chain grated behind me. The Street was awaiting my reappearance with interest. It greeted my expulsion with a howl of laughter, and pursued my retreat with a dropping fire of chaff. As I went on my way, I had leisure to reflect that I had extracted from Mother Carey everything that was of the least importance either to herself or me--just so much and no more. I had established the fact of her unsavoury existence, and that was the bare fruit of my enterprise. But I had still one forlorn hope to follow; one last nearly blank little card to play. And, as Luck would have it, that card was to prove the fateful one. What a trumpery pip, to be sure, looks an ace--a one-shotted gun. Yet the fortress capitulates to it, the knaves shiver before it, whole rows of arrogant royalties go down to its bang. Something that Mother Carey had let out (inadvertently, even fatuously, I could not but think) stuck in my mind. Impelled by a faint hope of promise in it, I made my way by the Albert Embankment and the South Lambeth Road to Stockwell, whence, from the Swan Tavern, I took a tram for Clapham. My purpose was to inquire about a certain problematic Dr Patterson, and it was my good fortune (_pace_ Luck) to learn not only that that respected practitioner was an existent actuality, but that he was still, after all these years, active in promoting the birth rate of his native suburb. I was even lucky enough to find him at home, in a very comfortable semi-detached house, of an old-time complexion, which faced the common on its south side. He had moved into this many years before, from a much smaller dwelling in Park Road down by the “Plough,” his practice having risen high in the interval on a modest foundation. So my informant--one of those garrulous terrors who _will_ volunteer more than they are asked to answer--confided to me.