in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gradually gathered what had happened. The girl Elizabeth had listened like an iceberg while he worked off the story he had prepared, and then—well, she didn’t actually call him a liar in so many words, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that he was a worm and an outcast. And then he crawled off with the kid, licked to a splinter.
“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.
I give you my word that, until I started to tramp the place with this child, I never had a notion that it was such a difficult job restoring