I said as much to Freddie, but he wasn't listening.
'Well, who is this ghastly child, then?' I said.
'I don't know. O Lord, I've had a time! Thank goodness you will probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for kidnapping. That's my only consolation. I'll come and jeer at you through the bars on visiting days.'
'Tell me all, old man,' I said.
He told me all. It took him a good long time to do it, for he broke off in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gradually gathered what had happened. The girl Elizabeth had listened like an iceberg while he worked off the story he had prepared, and then—well, she didn't actually call him a liar in so many words, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that he was a worm and an outcast. And then he crawled off with the kid, licked to a splinter.
'And mind,' he concluded, 'this is your affair. I'm not mixed up in it at all. If you want to escape your sentence—or anyway get a portion of it remitted—you'd better go and find the child's parents and return him before the police come for you.'
'Who are his parents?'
'I don't know.'
'Where do they live?'
'I don't know.'