'Ten minutes in the morning will finish everything,' Dorothy said. 'I will be down at a quarter to seven. Mildred can put the rest of the things in while we are at breakfast. All the boxes are packed and corded but one, and can be brought down as soon as I am out of the room. Is Captain Hampton going to shoot bears and that sort of thing, that you gave him warning?'
'He does not seem to have any fixed plan, Dorothy, but I fancy from what he said that he is more likely to wander about and look at the towns, and such places as Niagara and the other places tourists go to as a matter of course. He certainly did not say a word about shooting, and my warning was in no way given seriously. If we were not going away ourselves I should miss him amazingly, for a better fellow never trod in shoe leather. Now, it's half-past ten, dear, and the sooner we are both in bed the better, for we are to be called at six.'
While Ned Hampton had been away Jacob had spent his whole time in wandering in the suburbs in the vain hope of catching sight of the man and woman of whom he was in search. Ned had shown him the portrait, and the boy had examined it closely.
'I shall know her when I see her, Captain; one doesn't see gals like that every day. I seem to have seen some one like her, but I can't think where. I am sure she was not so pretty as that, not by a long way; but there is something in the picture that I seem to know.'
He was in when his master returned from the Hawtreys.
'No luck, Captain,' he said, apologetically, 'and it ain't been from want of tramping about, for I have walked about every day from eight in the morning and got home at evening that tired I could hardly get upstairs to bed.'
'By the way, Jacob, have you ever thought of whom the likeness reminded you? I told you to try and think who it was.'
'Yes, I know who it was now, but it ain't in our way at all. Four or five years ago I lived up a court at Chelsea, not far from that big hospital where they put the old soldiers. Well, there was a gal about two years older than me lived up in the attic of one of the houses in the court along with a woman. I don't remember what the old one's name was now, but she used to drink awful. She was about fifteen—the gal I mean—and I was about twelve. That gal had something of the look of the lady in the picture, except that the picture is smiling, and she used in general to look cross. I don't know what there was in her face that comes back to me as being like the picture, but there must have been something, else it would not have made me think of her.'
'Was the woman her mother?'
'I don't know, sir.'