"Nothing like that."
"Once more. Let us try it again, dear."
A most hopeless business. This time it swelled into four syllables.
"It can't be Tappitarver?" said s a i d Barbox Brothers,
rubbing his head with his hat in discomfiture.
"No! It ain't," the child quietly assented.
On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinary
efforts at distinction, it swelled into eight syllables at least.
"Ah! I think," said Barbox Brothers, with a desperate air of
resignation, "that we had better give it up."
"But I am lost," said the child nestling her little hand more closely
in his, "and you'll take care of me, won't you?"
If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion on the
one hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other,
here the man was. "Lost!" he repeated, looking down at the child.
"I am sure I am. What is to be done!"
"Where do _you_ live?" asked the child, looking up at him wistfully.
"Over there," he answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of the hotel.
"Hadn't we better go there?" said the child.
"Really," he replied, "I don't know but what we had.
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