"There! out with you! No vagrums here!"
Of course, they couldn't have all Queer Street in their waiting rooms, these railway people; and the man's words were rougher than his voice. But these were two children, who wanted cherishing!
The slink in the boy's eye worked down, and became a sneak and a shuffle, toward the door. The girl was following.
"Stop!" called a woman's voice, sharp and authoritative. "Don't you stir a single step, either of you, till you get warm! If there isn't any other way to fix it, I'll buy you both a ticket somewhere and then you'll be passengers."
It was a tall, thin, hoopless woman, with a carpetbag, a plaid shawl, and an umbrella; and a bonnet that, since other bonnets had begun to poke, looked like a chaise top flattened back at the first spring. In a word, Mehitable Sampson.
Something twitched at the corners of the man's mouth as he glanced round at this sudden and singular champion. Something may have twitched under his comfortable waistcoat, also. At any rate, he passed on; and the children—the brief battledore over in which they had been the shuttlecocks—crept back, compliant with the second order, much amazed, toward the stove.
Miss Sampson began to interrogate.
"Why don't you take your little sister home?"
"This one ain't my sister." Children always set people right before they answer queries.
"Well—whoever she is, then. Why don't you both go home?"