“And mind,” he concluded, “this is your affair. I’m not mixed up in it at all. If you want to escape your sentence⁠—or anyway get a portion of it remitted⁠—you’d better go and find the child’s parents and return him before the police come for you.”

“Who are his parents?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do they live?”

“I don’t know.”

The kid didn’t seem to know, either. A thoroughly vapid and uninformed infant. I got out of him the fact that he had a father, but that was as far as he went. It didn’t seem ever to have occurred to him, chatting of an evening with the old man, to ask him his name and address. So, after a wasted ten minutes, out we went into the great world, more or less what you might call at random.