It belonged, they said, to a rich up-town family that the girl was trying to black-mail.
But I don't see how that could be." "The child isn't about here ?" "Oh dear, no! If it was, it would have been found long before this, for the police are hunting around sharp.

If it's all as they say, she's got it hid somewhere else." While Mrs.Bray talked with the shop-woman, Pinky, who had made a hurried call at her room, only a hundred yards away, was going as fast as a street-car could take her to a distant part of the city.

On leaving the car at the corner of a narrow, half-deserted street, in which the only sign of life was a child or two at play in the snow and a couple of goats lying on a cellar-door, she walked for half the distance of a block, and then turned into a court lined on both sides with small, ill-conditioned houses, not half of them tenanted.

Snow and ice blocked the little road-way, except where a narrow path had been cut along close to the houses.
Without knocking, Pinky entered one of these poor tenements.

As she pushed open the door, a woman who was crouching down before a small stove, on which something was cooking, started up with a look of surprise that changed to one of anxiety and fear the moment she recognized her visitor.
"Is Andy all right ?" cried Pinky, alarm in her face.
The woman tried to stammer out something, but did not make herself understood.