Meg's Friend: A Story for Girls

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Katie Hernandez, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
I Wish I Were Dead! cried Elsie.--Page 200.

Author of Margery Merton's Girlhood, Down the Snow Stairs, Joan's Adventures, etc., etc.
WITH FIVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROBERT FOWLER.
NEW YORK:
A. L. BURT, PUBLISHER.


It was a queer old house in Bloomsbury, that had been fashionable some two hundred years ago, and had fallen into abject neglect. The hall door was dim for want of paint, and weatherbeaten to a dirty gray; the lower windows were tawdry with vulgar blinds and curtains, and enlivened with green boxes full of a few pining flowers. The drawing-room windows showed a sort of mildewed finery, and then, in melancholy degrees, poverty claimed the upper stories. It had all the features and cast of a London lodging house.
Within, the house carried out the same suggestion of past grandeur and present decay. The hall was wide, dingy, and unfurnished; the staircase of oak was impressive, stained, and dusty.
On the topmost step of the top flight might habitually be seen, toward sunset, a child seated and watching, with head thrust through the banisters. She would sit still until there came the scrape of a latchkey turning in the lock, and the sound of footsteps in the hall. Then the mute little figure would grow full of sudden life; the little feet would run down faster than eye could mark. Arrived in the hall, the child would stop with sudden dignity before a man, robust and tall, and looking up, ever so high, into a bright, young, manly face smiling down upon her, she would lift her tiny forefinger, and some such colloquy would ensue: