The door of Mrs. Farnaby’s ground-floor room, at the back of the house, was partially open. She was on the watch for Amelius.

“Come in!” she cried, the moment he appeared in the hall. She pulled him into the room, and shut the door with a bang. Her face was flushed, her eyes were wild. “I have something to tell you, you dear good fellow,” she burst out excitedly —“Something in confidence, between you and me!” She paused, and looked at him with sudden anxiety and alarm. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

The sight of the room, the reference to a secret, the prospect of another private conference, forced back the mind of Amelius, in one breathless instant, to his first memorable interview with Mrs. Farnaby. The mother’s piteously hopeful words, in speaking of her lost daughter, rang in his ears again as if they had just fallen from her lips. “She may be lost in the labyrinth of London. . . . To-morrow, or ten years hence, you might meet with her.” There were a hundred chances against it — a thousand, ten thousand chances against it. The startling possibility flashed across his brain, nevertheless, like a sudden flow of daylight across the dark. “Have I met with her, at the first chance?”

“Wait,” he cried; “I have something to say before you speak to me. Don’t deceive yourself with vain hopes. Promise me that, before I begin.”

She waved her hand derisively. “Hopes?” she repeated; “I have done with hopes, I have done with fears — I have got to certainties, at last!”

He was too eager to heed anything that she said to him; his whole soul was absorbed in the coming disclosure. “Two nights since,” he went on, “I was wandering about London, and I met —”

She burst out laughing. “Go on!” she cried, with a wild derisive gaiety.

Amelius stopped, perplexed and startled. “What are you laughing at?” he asked.

“Go on!” she repeated. “I defy you to surprise me. Out with it! Whom did you meet?”

Amelius proceeded doubtfully, by a word at a time. “I met a poor girl in the streets,” he said, steadily watching her.

She changed completely at those words; she looked at him with an aspect of stern reproach. “No more of it,” she interposed; “I have not waited all these miserable years for such a horrible end as that.” Her face suddenly brightened; a radiant effusion of tenderness and triumph flowed over it, and made it young and happy again. “Amelius!” she said, “listen to this. My dream has come true — my girl is found! Thanks to you, though you don’t know it.”

Amelius looked at her. Was she speaking of something that had really happened? or had she been dreaming again?

Absorbed in her own happiness, she made no remark on his silence. “I have seen the woman,” she went on. “This bright blessed morning I have seen the woman who took her away in the first days of her poor little life. The wretch swears she was not to blame. I tried to forgive her. Perhaps I almost did forgive her, in the joy of hearing what she had to tell me. I should never have heard it, Amelius, if you had not given that glorious lecture. The woman was one of your audience. She would never have spoken of those past days; she would never have thought of me —”

At those words, Mrs. Farnaby abruptly stopped, and turned her face away from Amelius. After waiting a little, finding her still silent, still immovable, he ventured on putting a question.

“Are you sure you are not deceived?” he asked. “I remember you told me that rogues had tried to impose on you, in past times when you employed people to find her.”

“I have proof that I am not being imposed upon,” Mrs. Farnaby answered, still keeping her face hidden from him. “One of them knows of the fault in her foot.”

“One of them?” Amelius repeated. “How many of them are there?”

“Two. The old woman, and a young man.”

“What are their names?”

“They won’t tell me their names yet.”

“Isn’t that a little suspicious?”

“One of them knows,” Mrs. Farnaby reiterated, “of the fault in her foot.”

“May I ask which of them knows? The old woman, I suppose?”

“No, the young man.”

“That’s strange, isn’t it? Have you seen the young man?”

“I know nothing of him, except the little that the woman told me. He has written me a letter.”

“May I look at it?”

“I daren’t let you look at it!”

Amelius said no more. If he had felt the smallest suspicion that the disclosure volunteered by Mrs. Farnaby, at their first interview, had been overheard by the unknown person who had opened the swinging window in the kitchen, he might have recalled Phoebe’s vindictive language at his lodgings, and the doubts suggested to him by his discovery of the vagabond waiting for her in the street. As it was, he was simply puzzled. The one plain conclusion to his mind was, unhappily, the natural conclusion after what he had heard — that Mrs. Farnaby had no sort of interest in the discovery of Simple Sally, and that he need trouble himself with no further anxiety in that matter. Strange as Mrs. Farnaby’s mysterious revelation seemed, her correspondent’s knowledge of the fault in the foot was circumstance in his favour, beyond dispute. Amelius still wondered inwardly how it was that the woman who had taken charge of the child had failed to discover what appeared to be known to another person. If he had been aware that Mrs. Sowler’s occupation at the time was the occupation of a “baby-farmer,” and that she had many other deserted children pining under her charge, he might have easily understood that she was the last person in the world to trouble herself with a minute examination of any one of the unfortunate little creatures abandoned to her drunken and merciless neglect. Jervy had satisfied himself, before he trusted her with his instructions, that she knew no more than the veriest stranger of any peculiarity in one or the other of the child’s feet.

Interpreting Mrs. Farnaby’s last reply to him as an intimation that their interview was at an end, Amelius took up his hat to go.

“I hope with all my heart,” he said, “that what has begun so well will end well. If there is any service that I can do for you —”

She drew nearer to him, and put her hand gently on his shoulder. “Don’t think that I distrust you,” she said very earnestly; “I am unwilling to shock you — that is all. Even this great joy has a dark side to it; my miserable married life casts its shadow on everything that happens to me. Keep secret from everybody the little that I have told you &m............