He looked at Madeline, and was astonished to see her so fair and elf-like, with a touch in her eyes of his poor dead friend, the literary Bohemian. Somehow or other he had always pictured her as a fat little country cherub, with very hard cheeks, a pug nose, and ugly feet. As she gazed at him with her great blue eyes, he felt troubled more and more. ‘You don’t remember poor Fred Hazelmere?’ he said to Cheveley. ‘No, he was gone before your time. But you’ve read his “Ballads of Bohemia”--by Jove, sir, some of them are worthy of the “Buch der Lieder.”’ And he added in a whisper, ‘That’s his child.’ He had led Cheveley aside, and was conversing with him apart, while Madeline and Uncle Luke sat waiting in the centre of the studio. ‘Look at her face,’ he proceeded. ‘Never saw such a likeness in my life--it quite turns me over. She looks a wild little thing, don’t she? The man with her is a sort of natural. It was absurd to think of sending her to me, for what on earth can I do with her? _I’m_ not her father, after all. Upon my soul, I’m in a dilemma. I must persuade him to take her back.’ But when White took Uncle Luke aside and tried to explain matters to him, the little man only began to cry. The home was broken up, he said; Aunt Jane’s only means of subsistence was to go out as a monthly nurse; and he himself was going to join a distant relation on the coast of Kent. ‘It ain’t that we want to lose her,’ he asseverated; ‘but oh, Master White, there be no home for Madlin now. Our hearts be broke, sir, to part wi’ her; but we know you’re next door to her father, and a gentleman born. She’ll be a heap better off here than ever she was along of us.’ ‘Here?’ gasped the dramatist. ‘She’s your’n, sir, more than our’n, bless her heart. We couldn’t feed her no more, let alone clothe her, now Mark’s gone to glory; but you’re a gentleman born, and can bring her up well-nigh like a lady. I brung her, Master White,’ he continued, reverting to his first fear; ‘but I dustn’t let her know I’m a-going to leave her--I dustn’t, indeed. She thinks she’s a-going back with me.’ ‘But I can’t take her!’ exclaimed White. ‘This is no place for a child, and even if it were she needs a woman’s care. I really can’t think of it; the very idea’s absurd.’ Uncle Luke looked astonished. In his simple judgment, the power of a ‘gentleman born,’ like Mr. White, was unlimited, and he could not fathom the significance of his refusal. ‘She’s that good,’ he explained gently, ‘that she’d be no manner o’ trouble to any, ’cept when she’s in her tantrums, and they’re gone as soon as come. And she’s clever, Master White. I’ve heerd schoolmaster say that she can spell like a good ’un, and her writin’s as clear as print. I see her write out the Lord’s Prayer on a piece of paper, and she guv it to her Uncle Mark, and if he’d ha’ lived, he was a-going to get it framed like a pictur’ and hung up on the cabin of the barge.’