One night, "in consequence of information received," as the police say, he kept watch, and at nine o'clock he saw the mother come out of the house cautiously, look around, and then return to emerge with a little girl. The officer, who had taken precautions against recognition, followed, and then the mystery was solved.
The little girl was earning the living of her parents by performing at a variety theatre. To prevent the interference of the school authorities the parents kept her shut up all day in the bedroom, and only brought her oat of It to take her to the music-hall.
There are secret chambers in London houses still, the mystery of which has yet to be revealed; some which may remain undiscovered, to be "mysteries" in the daily press fifty or a hundred years hence. The bricked-up cellar that thrills us in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe is playing its part in the criminal tragedies of the twentieth-century Babylon.
CHAPTER XIV—THE ROMANCE OF POVERTY
Noblemen who live in mean streets—A peer on a pound a week—A princess out in service—Lodgekeeper where once mistress—A grave-digger with royal blood—From £100,000 to nothing
Poverty has so many romances, and they are so varied.
Under the humblest roofs in this great city of ours men and women are daily writing in the book of life beautiful stories of tender love, of noble self-sacrifice, of deeds of heroic endurance. There are idylls of the slums and alleys as charming as ever poet penned; there are stories to be told of the dwellers in mean streets that lift our thoughts far above the sordid things of earth.
But these are romances pure and simple, and in them is no element of mystery. The romances I have in my mind as I write are those in which the poverty conceals from the eyes of the world a truth it would be greatly interested to learn.