As I passed this shop I now saw that on the same board was sitting a person in whom Winifred had taken still stronger interest.  This was a diminutive imitation of the deceased, in the person of his hump-backed son, a little man of about twenty-four, who might, as far as appearance went, have been any age from twenty to eighty, with a pale anxious face like his mother’s.  He was stitching at a coat with, apparently, the same pair of scissors by his side that used to delight us two children.  Standing by the side of the board, and looking on with a skilled intelligence shining from her pale eyes, was Mrs. Shales, with an infant in her arms—­a wasted little grandchild wrapt in a plaid shawl, apparently smoking a chibouque, but in reality sucking vigorously at the mouthpiece of a baby’s bottle, which it was clasping deftly with its pink little fingers.

Mrs. Shales beckoned me mysteriously into her shop, and then into the little parlour behind it, where she used to sit and watch the customers through the green muslin blind of the glass door, like a spider in its web.  Young Shales, who left his board, followed us, and they then gave me some news that at once decided my course of action.  They told me that one morning, after her frightful shock, Winifred had encountered Shales, who was taking, a holiday, and employing it in catching young crabs among the stones.  Winifred, who had a great liking for the hump-backed tailor, had come up to him and talked in a dazed way.  Shales, pitying her condition, had induced her to go home with him; and then it had occurred to him to go and inquire at the Hall what suggestion could be made concerning her at a house where her father had been so well known.  He could not see me; I was ill in bed.  He saw my mother, who at once suggested that Winifred should be taken to Wales, to an aunt with whom, according to Wynne, she had been living. (No one but myself knew anything of Wynne’s affairs, and my mother, though she had heard of the aunt, had not, as I then believed, heard of her death.) She proposed that Shales himself should contrive to take Winifred to Wales.  ‘She had reasons,’ she said, ’for wishing that Winifred should not be handed over to the local parish officer.’  She offered to pay Shales liberally for going. I, however, was to know nothing of this.  Her object, of course, was to get Winifred out of my way.  The aunt’s address was furnished by a Mr. Lacon of Dullingham, an old friend of Wynne’s, who also, it seems, was ignorant of the aunt’s death.  This aunt, a sister of Winifred’s mother, named Davies, the widow of a sea captain who had once known better days, resided in an old cottage between Bettws y Coed and Capel Curig.  Shales had found no difficulty in persuading Winifred to go with him, for she had now sunk into a condition of dazed stupor, and was very docile.