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I hurried him, with the evidences of his guilt, back to the scuttle, and descended on tiptoe to the floor beneath. Providence favored us: I met no one on the stairs; and his own cushioned tread was inaudible. I think he was conscious of the dangers of detection; for he even forebore to breathe, or much less chew the last mouthful he had taken; and he skulked at my side with the sirup dropping from his motionless jaws. I think he would have silently choked to death just then, for my sake; and it was not until I had reached my room again, and threw myself panting on the sofa, that I saw how near strangulation he had been. He gulped once or twice apologetically, and then walked to the corner of his own accord, and rolled himself up like an immense sugarplum, sweating remorse and treacle at every pore.

I locked him in when I went to breakfast, when I found Mrs. Brown’s lodgers in a state of intense excitement over certain mysterious events of the night before, and the dreadful revelations of the morning. It appeared that burglars had entered the block from the scuttles; that, being suddenly alarmed, they had quitted our house without committing any depredation, dropping even the boots they had collected in the halls; but that a desperate attempt had been made to force the till in the confectioner’s shop on the corner, and that the glass show-cases had been ruthlessly smashed. A courageous servant in No. 4 had seen a masked burglar, on his hands and knees, attempting to enter their scuttle; but, on her shouting, “Away wid yees!” he instantly fled.

I sat through this recital with cheeks that burned uncomfortably; nor was I the less embarrassed, on raising my eyes, to meet Mrs. Brown’s fixed curiously and mischievously on mine. As soon as I could make my escape from the table, I did so, and, running rapidly up stairs, sought refuge from any possible inquiry in my own room. Baby was still asleep in the corner. It would not be safe to remove him until the lodgers had gone down town; and I was revolving in my mind the expediency of keeping him until night veiled his obtrusive eccentricity from the public eye, when there came a cautious tap at my door. I opened it. Mrs. Brown slipped in quietly, closed the door softly, stood with her back against it, and her hand on the knob, and beckoned me mysteriously towards her. Then she asked in a low voice,–

“Is hair-dye poisonous?”

I was too confounded to speak.

“Oh, do! you know what I mean,” she said impatiently. “This stuff.” She produced suddenly from behind her a bottle with a Greek label so long as to run two or three times spirally around it from top to bottom. “He says it isn’t a dye: it’s a vegetable preparation, for invigorating”–

“Who says?” I asked despairingly.

“Why, Mr. Parker, of course!” said Mrs. Brown severely, with the air of having repeated the name a great many times,–“the old gentleman in the room above. The simple question I want to ask,” she continued with the calm manner of one who has just convicted another of gross ambiguity of language, “is only this: If some of this stuff were put in a saucer, and left carelessly on the table, and a child, or a baby, or a cat, or any young animal, should come in at the window, and drink it up,–a whole saucer full,–because it had a sweet taste, would it be likely to hurt them?”

I cast an anxious glance at Baby, sleeping peacefully in the corner, and a very grateful one at Mrs. Brown, and said I didn’t think it would.

“Because,” said Mrs. Brown loftily as she opened the door, “I thought, if it was poisonous, remedies might be used in time. Because,” she added suddenly, abandoning her lofty manner, and wildly rushing to the corner with a frantic embrace of the unconscious Baby, “because, if any nasty stuff should turn its booful hair a horrid green, or a naughty pink, it would break its own muzzer’s heart, it would!”