"I knowed that," said Bill, knocking the ashes out from his clay pipe. "It ain't the first time as I've met youngsters on the road, and, mebbe, it won't be the last, as folks in the village have been before the beak for harbouring them, poor little devils!" "A GIRL! GOD HELP HER!" The Lady Catherine Castleton lay dying in the stately bed-chamber of Castleton Hall. Night and day they had sought for my lord in clubs and gambling dens and well-known haunts of vice and pleasure, but they did not know of the rose-grown cottage on the Thames which he had taken for his latest inamorata. When they told my lady the child was a girl she had given a low cry, "God help her!" and had turned her face to the wall. Great obstetricians summoned by telephone had sped in flying motors from town, but they stood baffled and helpless by the bedside of the young woman, who lay so still and indifferent, making no effort to live. In the library the family lawyer and the white-haired admiral, her father, sat signing cheques for the great specialists, who had done so little and charged so much. When they had gone the admiral, who loved his daughter, swore long and vigorously with the gorgeous powers of the seafaring man, and the lawyer listened with fascinated approval. "I told her what her life would be with a loose-living scoundrel like Castleton, but she would not listen--madly in love with him and his handsome face, and now he has killed her at twenty-two!" "I had a very distressing interview with Lady Catherine a few weeks ago. She went away in disgust and despair when I had to tell her that I did not think she had sufficient evidence for a divorce, and that she must prove cruelty or desertion as well as adultery." "D---d shameful law, sir; can't think how the country puts up with it. But she shall be safe from him if she lives, my poor little girl!" Then they were silent, for the shadow of death crept nearer. * * * * * Outside the park gates at the end of the village, in Castleton Union, another girl lay dying. The local practitioner had been called in on his way back from consultation with the great gynæcologists, and as at the hall, so in the workhouse, he found his patient sinking. "She came in late last night, sir," said the nurse, "and the child was born almost immediately. Her pulse is very weak, and I can't rouse her; she won't even look at the child." "I hear it is Jennie Appleton, the carpenter's daughter at Kingsford--very respectable people. How did she get here?"