scruple about using the arts of prevarication; she was a kind and innocent creature, but she told fibs as freely as she invented trimmings. She had, however, not yet been questioned by an emissary of the law, and her heart beat faster when Mrs Bowerbank said to her, in deep tones, with an effect of abruptness, “And pray, Miss Pynsent, does the child know it?” “Know about Lord Frederick?” Miss Pynsent palpitated. “Bother Lord Frederick! Know about his mother.” “Oh, I can’t say that. I have never told him.” “But has any one else told him?” To this inquiry Miss Pynsent’s answer was more prompt and more proud; it was with an agreeable sense of having conducted herself with extraordinary wisdom and propriety that she replied, “How could any one know? I have never breathed it to a creature!” Mrs Bowerbank gave utterance to no commendation; she only put down her empty glass and wiped her large mouth with much thoroughness and deliberation. Then she said, as if it were as cheerful an idea as, in the premises, she was capable of expressing, “Ah, well, there’ll be plenty, later on, to give him all information!” “I pray God he may live and die without knowing it!” Miss Pynsent cried, with eagerness. Her companion gazed at her with a kind of professional patience. “You don’t keep your ideas together. How can he go to her, then, if he’s never to know?” “Oh, did you mean she would tell him?” Miss Pynsent responded, plaintively. “Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and gives him—what she told me.” “What she told you?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed. “The kiss her lips have been famished for, for years.” “Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured, with her pity gushing up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she pursued, simply. Then she added, with an inspiration more brilliant, “We might tell him she’s his aunt!” “You may tell him she’s his grandmother, if you like. But it’s all in the family.” “Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent, musingly and irrepressibly. “And will she speak French?” she inquired. “In that case he won’t understand.” “Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort. But she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which bristled with dangers, “Of course, it’s just according to your own conscience. You needn’t bring the child at all, unless you like. There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.” “And would nothing be done to me, if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent asked, unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the arm of the law that was stretched out to touch her. “The only thing that could happen to you would be that _he_ might throw it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed, with a gloomy impartiality. “Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.”