"No. I'll look him up in the album in the station when I go off duty."
"Well, he can't do any harm here. O'Brien takes visitors over a regular round, and, in any case, the man seemed to be honest enough in his curiosity."
"You never can tell. They're up to all sorts of dodges."
"Thanks very much. I'll ring for O'Brien's relief and tell him to keep an eye on them, as the old man is blind as a bat."
Meanwhile the stranger was being conducted up a wide staircase by a somewhat tottering guide, who wore on the breast of his uniform the Crimean and Indian Mutiny medals.
As he hobbled in front, he told, with a strong, Irish brogue, the familiar story of the Mary Anson Home—how it fed, lodged and clothed six hundred boys of British parentage born in the Whitechapel district; how it taught them trades and followed their careers with fostering care; how it never refused a meal or a warm sleeping place to any boy, no matter where he came from or what his nationality, provided he satisfied the superintendent that he was really destitute or needed his small capital for trading purposes next day.
The great central hall where the six hundred regular inmates ate their meals, the dormitories, the playgrounds, the drill shed and gymnasium, the workshops, the library, the theater, were all pointed out, but the big man with the staring eyes was not interested one jot in any of these things.
"Who was Mary Anson?" he asked, when the well-worn tale was ended, "and how did she come to build such a fine place here?"
"Ah, ye may well ax that," said old O'Brien. "Sure, she didn't build it at all at all. She was a poor widdy livin' alone-st wid one son, Mr. Philip that is now. She was a born lady, but she kem down in the worruld and died, forlorn an' forgotten, in a little shanty in Johnson's Mews, as it was called in those days."
"I remember it well."