Page:Malot - Nobodys Boy, Crewe-Jones, 1916.djvu/32

 I ought, of course, to have told him that I was not asleep, but I did not dare. I had been ordered to go to sleep, I was not yet asleep, so I was in the wrong.

"Well, what about your lawsuit?" asked Mother Barberin.

"Lost it. The judge said that I was to blame for being under the scaffold." Thereupon he banged his fist on the table and began to swear, without saying anything that meant anything.

"Case lost," he went on after a moment; "money lost, all gone, poverty staring us in the face. And as though that isn't enough, when I get back here, I find a child. Why didn't you do what I told you to do?"

"Because I couldn't."

"You could not take him to a Foundlings' Home?"

"A woman can't give up a little mite like that if she's fed it with her own milk and grown to love it."

"It's not your child."

"Well, I wanted to do what you told me, but just at that very moment he fell ill."

"Ill?"

"Yes. Then I couldn't take him to that place. He might have died."

"But when he got better?"

"Well, he didn't get better all at once. After that sickness another came. He coughed so it would have made your heart bleed to hear him,