time arrived for fastening down the coffin lids, I could not bear to
permit that ceremony to be performed without affording him an
opportunity of kissing the dead lips of his darling for the last time.
I gently led him up to the side of the bed upon which the two coffins
were placed. At sight of his little boy's dead face, he fainted, and
before he revived I had the lids fastened down. It would have been
cruelty to subject him to the ordeal a second time.

The day after the funeral he was sufficiently recovered from the shock
to be able to talk. He informed me that he had concluded to leave the
neighbourhood, and requested me to draw up a poster, advertising all
his furniture and effects for sale by auction. He intended, he said, to
sell everything except Charlie's clothes and his own, and these,
together with a lock of the child's hair and a few of his toys, were
all he intended to take away with him.

"But of course," I remarked, "you don't intend to sell the stone
likeness?"

He looked at me rather strangely, and made no reply. I glanced around
the room, and, to my surprise, the little statue was nowhere to be
seen. It then occurred to me that I had not noticed it since Gagtooth
had been taken ill.

"By the by, where is it?" I enquired--"I don't see it."

After a moment's hesitation he told me the whole story. It was then
that I learned for the first time that he had lost all his savings
through the failure of Messrs. Gowanlock and Van Duzer, and that the
morning when he had been taken ill there had been only a dollar in the