It was tea time, the kitchen blind was down, the gas was lit; and mother was toasting a muffin for the Foreman Shunter, who was about to go on duty. "He can't stay here, you know. We've as many as we can manage already." "I know that," snapped Mother. Like most mothers who are worth their salt, she had rather a habit of snapping at the Foreman Shunter. The boy was feeling wonderfully comfortable. In fact, he had never felt so comfortable in his life. And he was just sufficiently awake to know that his fate was being decided upon. "What'll you do with him, anyhow?" "I don't know," snapped Mother. "I don't neither. Seems to me there's nothing for it but to hand him over to the police." The boy was fully awake now. His heart stood still. It seemed an age before mother spoke in answer to this terrible suggestion. "Yes, of course, there's always that," she said, at last. The boy's heart died within him. "He can't stay here, that's a moral," said the Foreman Shunter. "I never said he could," snapped Mother. "But I don't hold with the police myself. It means the Work'us, and you'd better not be born at all, Job Lorimer, than go to the Work'us." "You are right there," said the Foreman Shunter. "He wants a honest occipation," said Mother, buttering the muffin. "He wants eddicatin' first," said the Foreman Shunter, beginning to eat the muffin. "What can you do with a kid like that? Don't know A from a bull's foot. Not fit for any decent society." "You are right there," said Mother. "But I'm all against the Work'us, and it's no use purtending I ain't." "Same here," said the Foreman Shunter. "But he can't stay at No. 12, Gladstone Villas, and you can lay to that." "Did I say he could?" snapped Mother yet again. "Very well, then." And the Foreman Shunter went on duty. It took five days for the _famille_ Lorimer to decide the fate of Henry Harper. Five wonderful days in which he lay most of the time wrapped in warm blankets on a most comfortable sofa in a warm room. Everybody was remarkably good to him. He had the nicest things to eat and drink that had ever come his way; he was spoken to in the only kind tones that had ever been used to him in all his thirteen years of life. He was given a clean shirt of Alfie's without a single hole in it; he was given a pair of Johnnie's socks; a pair of the Foreman Shunter's trousers were cut down for him; he was given boots (Alfie's), a waistcoat (Alfie's), a jacket (Alfie's), a necktie (Johnnie's), a clean linen collar (Alfie's), a red-spotted handkerchief (Percy's--by Percy's own request). In fact, in those five days he was by way of being taken to the bosom of the family.