“After all, he isn’t hers any more—he’s mine, mine only and mine always. I should like to know if all I’ve done for him doesn’t make him so!” It was in this manner that Amanda Pynsent delivered herself while she plied her needle faster than ever in a piece of stuff that was pinned to her knee. Mr. Vetch watched her a while, blowing silently at his pipe, his head thrown back on the high, stiff, old-fashioned sofa and his little legs crossed under him like a Turk’s. “It’s true you’ve done a good deal for him. You’re a good little woman, my dear Pinnie, after all.” He said “after all” because that was a part of his tone. In reality he had never had a moment’s doubt that she was the best little woman in the north of London. “I’ve done what I could, and I don’t put myself forward above others. Only it does make a difference when you come to look at it—about taking him off to see another woman. And _such_ another woman—and in such a place! I think it’s hardly right to take an innocent child.” “I don’t know about that; there are people who would tell you it would do him good. If he didn’t like the place as a child he’d take more care to keep out of it later.” “Lord, Mr. Vetch, how can you think? And him such a perfect little gentleman!” Miss Pynsent cried. “Is it you that have made him one?” the fiddler asked. “It doesn’t run in the family, you’d say.” “Family? what do you know about that?” she returned quickly, catching at her dearest, her only hobby. “Yes indeed, what does any one know? what did she know herself?” And then Miss Pynsent’s visitor added irrelevantly: “Why should you have taken him on your back? Why did you want to be so extra good? No one else thinks it necessary.” “I didn’t want to be extra good. That is I do want to, of course, in a general way: but that wasn’t the reason then. You see I had nothing of my own—I had nothing in the world but my thimble.” “That would have seemed to most people a reason for not adopting a prostitute’s bastard.” “Well, I went to see him at the place where he was (just where she had left him, with the woman of the house) and I saw what kind of a shop _that_ was, and felt it a shame an unspotted child should grow up in such a place.” Miss Pynsent defended herself as earnestly as if her inconsistency had been of a criminal cast. “And he wouldn’t have grown up neither. _They_ wouldn’t have troubled themselves long with a helpless baby. _They’d_ have played some bad trick on him, if it was only to send him to the workhouse. Besides, I always was fond of tiny creatures and I’ve been fond of this one,” she went on, speaking as if with a consciousness, on her own part, of almost heroic proportions. “He was in my way the first two or three years, and it was a good deal of a pull to look after the business and him together. But now he’s like the business—he seems to go of himself.”