"This is the boy--this is Joseph, dear mother; he tells me that those two little girls are suffering--that they have not a cent to get food with; now will you refuse me?" Mrs. Farnham kept her eyes bent upon Joseph. "What is it you have been telling my son about these poor people?" "Oh, they have suffered so much, Madam--not a morsel to eat nor a house to rest in when they come home from poor Mr. Chester's funeral; but worst of all, the good lady who was so very, very ill, has got up when the girls were out, and gone away. She wasn't in her head, ma'am, raving with fever, and may be killed in the street." It seemed impossible to look into those pleading eyes, and resist them. Mrs. Farnham took out her portmonnaie again, rather ostentatiously, for vanity always mingled with the best feelings and most trivial acts of her life. "There," she said, presenting a bank-note to the lad, "take this, and give it to the poor family," and she looked consequentially round upon the stranger, as if to claim his approbation for her charity. The Judge smiled rather constrainedly, and Mrs. Farnham added, turning to Joseph, "See now that the money is spent for comforts, nothing else; I would have given it to you, Fred, only as I was saying, there is a medium to be observed--you will remember, my boy." Joseph's eyes shone like sapphires. "I will give it to your sister, Mrs. Peters, ma'am; she lives down stairs in the same house, and will take care of it for the little girls," he said, giving a terrible blow to Mrs. Farnham's pride, in the innocence of his gratitude. Mrs. Farnham blushed up to the temples, shaded by her pale, flaxen curls, at this exposure, and the Judge smiled a little more decidedly, which turned the mean crimson of her shame into a flush of anger. "You are a very forward little boy," she was about to say, but the words faltered on her lips, and she merely turned away, overwhelming poor Joseph with her stateliness. "Mother, I am going with him to look for this poor lady," exclaimed Frederick. "The police must help us." "You will do no such thing," answered Mrs. Farnham, sharply; "I declare, sir, the boy torments my life out with his taste for running after low people." "They are not low people." Fred broke off abruptly, for his father entered very quietly, and with a look so at variance with his usual cold reserve, that even his vixenish and very silly wife observed it. "What is the matter?--you have been walking home in the heat!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Farnham, will you never remember that there is a medium?" For once Farnham deigned to answer his wife. "I walked very slowly, and am not tired," he said, "but what is this? what is it Frederick proposes to do?" "Mrs. Chester has escaped from her house, sir, in a raving fever, and cannot be found. I was going with Joseph, here, to search for her," answered Frederick, looking anxiously into his father's face.