CHAPTER XV.
_WHEN_ Mr.Dinneford and the policeman sent by the mayor at his solicitation visited Grubb's court, the baby was not to be found.

The room in which it had been seen by Mr.Paulding was vacant.

Such a room as it was!--low and narrow, with bare, blackened walls, the single window having scarcely two whole panes of glass, the air loaded with the foulness that exhaled from the filth-covered floor, the only furniture a rough box and a dirty old straw bed lying in a corner.
As Mr.Dinneford stood at the door of this room and inhaled its fetid air, he grew sick, almost faint.

Stepping back, with a shocked and disgusted look on his face, he said to the policeman, "There must be a mistake.

This cannot be the room." Two or three children and a coarse, half-clothed woman, seeing a gentleman going into the house accompanied by a policeman, had followed them closely up stairs.
"Who lives in this room ?" asked the policeman, addressing the woman.
"Don't know as anybody lives there now," she replied, with evident evasion.
"Who did live here ?" demanded the policeman.
"Oh, lots!" returned the woman, curtly.
"I want to know who lived here last," said the policeman, a little sternly.
"Can't say--never keep the run of 'em," answered the woman, with more indifference than she felt.