The boy told him why he plodded so wearily, day after day, over here in the West-end. It was for family reasons, into which I must not go too closely. Somebody, it appeared, still came home, now and then, just once in a way, to see her mother, and to visit the den where she was bred; and there was still left one who would wait for her, week after week—still one pair of childish feet, bare and dirty, that would patter back beside her—still one childish voice that would prattle with her, on her way to her hideous home, and call her sister.
"Have you any brothers?"
Five altogether. Jim was gone for a sojer, it appeared, and Nipper was sent over the water. Harry was on the cross—
"On the cross?" said Charles.
"Ah!" the boy said, "he goes out cly-faking, and such. He's a prig, and a smart one, too. He's fly, is Harry."
"But what is cly-faking?" said Charles.
"Why a-prigging of wipes, and sneeze-boxes, and ridicules, and such."
Charles was not so ignorant of slang as not to understand what his little friend meant now. He said—
"But you are not a thief, are you?"
The boy looked up at him frankly and honestly, and said—