time over her researches.

A sound from the lower part of the house checked her returning
steps; some one was rapping at the door down in the area. It
happened that she was to-day without a servant; she must needs
descend into the kitchen herself and answer the summons. When the
nether regions were illumined and the door thrown open, Lilian
beheld a familiar figure, that of a scraggy and wretchedly clad
woman with a moaning infant in her arms.

"Oh, it's you, Mrs. Wilson!" she exclaimed. "Please to come in. How
have _you_ been getting on? And how is baby?"

The woman took a seat by the kitchen fire, and began to talk in a
whining, mendicant tone. From the conversation it appeared that this
was by no means the first time she had visited Lilian and sought to
arouse her compassion; the stories she poured forth consisted in a
great measure of excuses for not having profited more substantially
by the help already given her. The eye and the ear of experience
would readily enough have perceived in Mrs. Wilson a very coarse
type of impostor, and even Lilian, though showing a face of distress
at what she heard, seemed to hesitate in her replies and to
entertain troublesome doubts. But the objection she ventured to make
to a flagrant inconsistency m the tale called forth such loud
indignation, such a noisy mixture of insolence and grovelling
entreaty, that her moral courage gave way and Mrs. Wilson whined for
another quarter of an hour in complete security from
cross-examination. In the end Lilian brought out her purse and took
from it half-a-sovereign.