They all nodded. "You're all in it," he exclaimed, flattered to think that they had considered it necessary to combine the efforts of so many of them to deceive him.

"Yes," a.s.sented Jimmy sadly, "we are all 'in it.'"

"Well, she's a great actress," decided Alfred, with the air of a connoisseur.

"She sure is," admitted Donneghey, more and more disgruntled as he felt his reputation for detecting fraud slipping from him. "She put up a phoney story about the kid being hers," he added. "But I could tell she wasn't on the level. Good-night, sir," he called to Alfred, and ignoring Jimmy, he pa.s.sed quickly from the room.

"Oh, officer," Alfred called after him. "Hang around downstairs. I'll be down later and fix things up with you." Again Alfred gave his whole attention to his new-found family. He leaned over the cradle and gazed ecstatically into the three small faces below his. "This is too much,"

he murmured.

"Much too much," agreed Jimmy, who was now sitting hunched up on the couch in his customary att.i.tude of gloom.

"You were right not to break it to me too suddenly," said Alfred, and with his arms encircling three infants he settled himself on the couch by Jimmy's side. "You're a cute one," he continued to Jimmy, who was edging away from the three mites with aversion. In the absence of any answer from Jimmy, Alfred appealed to Zoie, "Isn't he a cute one, dear?"

he asked.

"Oh, yes, VERY," answered Zoie, sarcastically.

Shutting his lips tight and glancing at Zoie with a determined effort at self restraint, Jimmy rose from the couch and started toward the door.

"If you women are done with me," he said, "I'll clear out."

"Clear out?" exclaimed Alfred, rising quickly and placing himself between his old friend and the door. "What a chance," and he laughed boisterously. "You're not going to get out of my sight this night," he declared. "I'm just beginning to appreciate all you've done for me."

"So am I," a.s.sented Jimmy, and unconsciously his hand sought the spot where his dinner should have been, but Alfred was not to be resisted.

"A man needs someone around," he declared, "when he's going through a thing like this. I need all of you, all of you," and with his eyes he embraced the weary circle of faces about him. "I feel as though I could go out of my head," he explained and with that he began tucking the three small mites in the pink and white crib designed for but one.

Zoie regarded him with a bored expression'

"You act as though you WERE out of your head," she commented, but Alfred did not heed her. He was now engaged in the unhoped for bliss of singing three babies to sleep with one lullaby.

The other occupants of the room were just beginning to relax and to show some resemblance to their natural selves, when their features were again simultaneously frozen by a ring at the outside door.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Annoyed at being interrupted in the midst of his lullaby, to three, Alfred looked up to see Maggie, hatless and out of breath, bursting into the room, and destroying what was to him an ideally tranquil home scene.

But Maggie paid no heed to Alfred's look of inquiry. She made directly for the side of Zoie's bed.

"If you plaze, mum," she panted, looking down at Zoie, and wringing her hands.

"What is it?" asked Aggie, who had now reached the side of the bed.

"'Scuse me for comin' right in"--Maggie was breathing hard--"but me mother sint me to tell you that me father is jus afther comin' home from work, and he's fightin' mad about the babies, mum."

"Sh! Sh!" cautioned Aggie and Zoie, as they glanced nervously toward Alfred who was rising from his place beside the cradle with increasing interest in Maggie's conversation.

"Babies?" he repeated, "your father is mad about babies?"

"It's all right, dear," interrupted Zoie nervously; "you see," she went on to explain, pointing toward the trembling Maggie, "this is our washerwoman's little girl. Our washerwoman has had twins, too, and it made the wash late, and her husband is angry about it."

"Oh," said Alfred, with a comprehensive nod, but Maggie was not to be so easily disposed of.

"If you please, mum," she objected, "it ain't about the wash. It's about our baby girls."

"Girls?" exclaimed Zoie involuntarily.

"Girls?" repeated Alfred, drawing himself up in the fond conviction that all his heirs were boys, "No wonder your pa's angry. I'd be angry too.

Come now," he said to Maggie, patting the child on the shoulder and regarding her indulgently, "you go straight home and tell your father that what HE needs is BOYS."

"Well, of course, sir," answered the bewildered Maggie, thinking that Alfred meant to reflect upon the gender of the offspring donated by her parents, "if you ain't afther likin' girls, me mother sint the money back," and with that she began to feel for the pocket in her red flannel petticoat.

"The money?" repeated Alfred, in a puzzled way, "what money?"

It was again Zoie's time to think quickly.

"The money for the wash, dear," she explained.

"Nonsense!" retorted Alfred, positively beaming generosity, "who talks of money at such a time as this?" And taking a ten dollar bill from his pocket, he thrust it in Maggie's outstretched hand, while she was trying to return to him the original purchase money. "Here," he said to the astonished girl, "you take this to your father. Tell him I sent it to him for his babies. Tell him to start a bank account with it."

This was clearly not a case with which one small addled mind could deal, or at least, so Maggie decided. She had a hazy idea that Alfred was adding something to the original purchase price of her young sisters, but she was quite at a loss to know how to refuse the offer of such a "grand 'hoigh" gentleman, even though her failure to do so would no doubt result in a beating when she reached home. She stared at Alfred undecided what to do, the money still lay in her outstretched hand.

"I'm afraid Pa'll niver loike it, sir," she said.

"Like it?" exclaimed Alfred in high feather, and he himself closed her red little fingers over the bill, "he's GOT to like it. He'll GROW to like it. Now you run along," he concluded to Maggie, as he urged her toward the door, "and tell him what I say."

"Yes, sir," murmured Maggie, far from sharing Alfred's enthusiasm.

Feeling no desire to renew his acquaintance with Maggie, particularly under Alfred's watchful eye, Jimmy had sought his old refuge, the high backed chair. As affairs progressed and there seemed no doubt of Zoie's being able to handle the situation to the satisfaction of all concerned, Jimmy allowed exhaustion and the warmth of the firelight to have their way with him. His mind wandered toward other things and finally into s.p.a.ce. His head dropped lower and lower on his chest; his breathing became laboured--so laboured in fact that it attracted the attention of Maggie, who was about to pa.s.s him on her way to the door.

"Sure an it's Mr. Jinks!" exclaimed Maggie. Then coming close to the side of the unsuspecting sleeper, she hissed a startling message in his ear. "Me mother said to tell you that me fadder's hoppin' mad at you, sir."

Jimmy sat up and rubbed his eyes. He studied the young person at his elbow, then he glanced at Alfred, utterly befuddled as to what had happened while he had been on a journey to happier scenes. Apparently Maggie was waiting for an answer to something, but to what? Jimmy thought he detected an ominous look in Alfred's eyes. Letting his hand fall over the arm of the chair so that Alfred could not see it, Jimmy began to make frantic signals to Maggie to depart; she stared at him the harder.

"Go away," whispered Jimmy, but Maggie did not move. "Shoo, shoo!" he said, and waved her off with his hand.

Puzzled by Jimmy's sudden aversion to this apparently harmless child, Alfred turned to Maggie with a puckered brow.

"Your father's mad at Jimmy?" he repeated. "What about?"

For once Jimmy found it in his heart to be grateful to Zoie for the prompt answer that came from her direction.

"The wash, dear," said Zoie to Alfred; "Jimmy had to go after the wash,"

and then with a look which Maggie could not mistake for an invitation to stop longer, Zoie called to her haughtily, "You needn't wait, Maggie; we understand."

"Sure, an' it's more 'an I do," answered Maggie, and shaking her head sadly, she slipped from the room.

But Alfred could not immediately dismiss from his mind the picture of Maggie's inhuman parent.