Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/157

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him, and that I would never see him again, and that he wouldn't tell me where he was going. But I know him so well, Tom, that I knew where he would go as surely as if he had told me."

"Where is that?"

"Why, to his brother's in Singapore."

"And you were so sure of that that you started to follow him, to tell him you forgave him and couldn't do without him—you poor old Ellen!"

"Yes," she said, with a frank little smile, "I know Tibbs so well. We got here this morning, and poor little Jack didn't stand the trip well."

They turned a corner, and the woman led into a dingy fruit-shop—mostly dirt, dusty wine-bottles, and the usual assortment of played-out fruits, blackened and small, which you see in tropical and semitropical countries. On a pile of plaited mats, that looked as though they contained all the germs of all the diseases from A to Z and others undiscovered, a little child, who seemed to exist without the aid of blood, rested wearily, and read