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 Noaks, and at the sound of his voice Mrs. Batch rushed into the middle of the road, to gaze up. "_I_ love you. Think what you will of me. I—"

"You!" flashed Zuleika. "As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the contamination of your plunge."

"Shame on you, Mr. Noaks," said Mrs. Batch, "making believe you were dead—"

"Shame!" screamed Clarence, who had darted out into the fray.

"I found him hiding behind the curtain," chimed in Katie.

"And I a mother to him!" said Mrs. Batch, shaking her fist. "'What is life without love?' indeed! Oh, the cowardly, underhand—"

"Wretch," prompted her cronies.

"Let's kick him out of the house!" suggested Clarence, dancing for joy.

Zuleika, smiling brilliantly down at the boy, said "Just you run up and fight him!"

"Right you are," he answered, with a look of knightly devotion, and darted back into the house.

"No escape!" she cried up to No