Page:Malot - Nobodys Boy, Crewe-Jones, 1916.djvu/328

 who sat in their doorways were pale and their matted fair hair hung loose over their shoulders. The children were almost naked and the few clothes that they did wear were but rags. In the alley were some pigs wallowing in the stagnant water from which a fetid odor arose. Our guide stopped. Evidently he had lost his way. But at this moment a policeman appeared. The clerk spoke to him and the officer told him he would show him the way... We followed the policeman down more narrow streets. At last we stopped at a yard in the middle of which was a little pond.

"This is Red Lion Court," said the officer.

Why were we stopping there? Could it be possible that my parents lived in this place? The policeman knocked at the door of a wooden hut and our guide thanked him. So we had arrived. Mattia took my hand and gently pressed it. I pressed his. We understood one another. I was as in a dream when the door was opened and we found ourselves in a room with a big fire burning in the grate.

Before the fire in a large cane chair sat an old man with a white beard, and his head covered with a black skull cap. At a table sat a man of about forty and a woman about six years his junior. She must have been very pretty once but now her eyes had a glassy stare and her manners were listless. Then there were four children—two boys and two girls—all very fair like their mother. The eldest boy was about eleven, the youngest girl, scarcely three.