still a little divided between her master's
chimney-piece and her master. "I take tea,"
Mr. Wilding went on; "and I am perhaps
rather nervous and fidgety about drinking it,
within a certain time after it is made. If my
tea stands too long—-"

He hesitated, on his side, and left the sentence
unfinished. If he had not been engaged in
discussing a subject of such paramount interest
to himself as his breakfast, Mrs. Goldstraw
might have fancied that his attention was
beginning to wander at the very outset of the
interview.

"If your tea stands too long, sir—-?" said
the housekeeper, politely taking up her master's
lost thread.

"If my tea stands too long," repeated the
wine-merchant, mechanically, his mind getting
further and further away from his breakfast,
and his eyes fixing themselves more and more
inquiringly on his housekeeper's face. "If
my tea——Dear, dear me, Mrs. Goldstraw!
what is the manner and tone of voice that you
remind me of? It strikes me even more
strongly to-day, than it did when I saw you
yesterday. What can it be?"

"What can it be?" repeated Mrs.
Goldstraw.

She said the words, evidently thinking while
she spoke them of something else. The
wine-merchant, still looking at her inquiringly,
observed that her eyes wandered towards the
chimney-piece once more. They fixed on the
portrait of his mother, which hung there, and
looked at it with that slight contraction of the
brow which accompanies a scarcely conscious
effort of memory. Mr. Wilding remarked:

"My late dear mother, when she was five-
and-twenty."

Mrs. Goldstraw thanked him with a
movement of the head for being at the pains to
explain the picture, and said, with a cleared brow,
that it was the portrait of a very beautiful lady.

Mr. Wilding, falling back into his former
perplexity, tried once more to recover that lost
recollection, associated so closely, and yet so
undiscoverably, with his new housekeeper's
voice and manner.

"Excuse my asking you a question which
has nothing to do with me or my breakfast,"
he said. "May I inquire if you have ever
occupied any other situation than the situation of
housekeeper?"

"Oh yes, sir. I began life as one of the
nurses at the Foundling."

"Why, that's it!" cried the wine-merchant,
pushing back his chair. "By Heaven! Their
manner is the manner you remind me of!"

In an astonished look at him, Mrs. Goldstraw
changed colour, checked herself, turned her
eyes upon the ground, and sat still and silent.

"What is the matter?" asked Mr. Wilding.

"Do I understand that you were in the
Foundling, sir?"

"Certainly. I am not ashamed to own it."

"Under the name you now bear?"

"Under the name of Walter Wilding."

"And the lady——?" Mrs. Goldstraw
stopped short, with a look at the portrait
which was now unmistakably a look of alarm.

"You mean my mother," interrupted Mr.
Wilding.

"Your—mother," repeated the housekeeper,
a little constrainedly, " removed you from the
Foundling? At what age, sir?"

"At between eleven and twelve years old.
It's quite a romantic adventure, Mrs.
Goldstraw."

He told the story of the lady having spoken
to him, while he sat at dinner with the other
boys in the Foundling, and of all that had
followed, in his innocently communicative way.
"My poor mother could never have discovered
me," he added, "if she had not met with one
of the matrons who pitied her. The matron
consented to touch the boy whose name was
'Walter Wilding' as she went round the dinner-
tables and so my mother discovered me again,
after having parted from me as an infant at the
Foundling doors."

At those words Mrs. Goldstraw's hand, resting
on the table, dropped helplessly into her lap.
She sat, looking at her new master, with a face
that had turned deadly pale, and with eyes that
expressed an unutterable dismay.

"What does this mean?" asked the wine-
merchant. "Stop!" he cried. " Is there
something else in the past time which I ought to
associate with you? I remember my mother
telling me of another person at the Foundling,
to whose kindness she owed a debt of gratitude.
When she first parted with me, as an infant, one
of the nurses informed her of the name that had
been given to me in the institution. You were
that nurse?"

"God forgive me, sir—I was that nurse!"

"God forgive you?"

"We had better get back, sir (if I may make
so bold as to say so), to my duties in the
house," said Mrs. Goldstraw. "Your breakfast-
hour is eight. Do you lunch, or dine, in the
middle of the day?".

The excessive pinkness which Mr. Bintrey
had noticed in his client's face began to appear
there once more. Mr. Wilding put his hand to
his head, and mastered some momentary
confusion in that quarter, before he spoke again.

"Mrs. Goldstraw," he said, "you are
concealing something from me!"

The housekeeper obstinately repeated, "Please
to favour me, sir, by saying whether you lunch,
or dine, in the middle of the day?"

"I don't know what I do in the middle of the
day. I can't enter into my household affairs,
Mrs. Goldstraw, till I know why you regret an
act of kindness to my mother, which she always
spoke of gratefully to the end of her life. You
are not doing me a service by your silence. You
are agitating me, you are alarming me, you are
bringing on the singing in my head."

His hand went up to his head again, and the
pink in his face deepened by a shade or two.

"It's hard, sir, on just entering your
service," said the housekeeper, "to say what may
cost me the loss of your good will. Please to
remember, end how it may, that I only speak