“One might have known she was a friend of Mrs. Hudson,” remarked Ernie, vindictively, as we reached the foot of the basement stairs. “Depressing influence, indeed! I’d like to depress her precious Lilian for her!”
“Oh, Ernie,” I sighed. “It would have meant fifteen dollars more each week!”
We were to have beefsteak for dinner. Mother had gone around earlier in the afternoon to a cheap little butcher shop (we can’t afford our old tradesmen any longer), and bought two pounds,—spending our last forty cents. There were four potatoes in the oven, a few beans on the top of the stove,—but no bread.
“Mother shan’t be disturbed,” I cried. “I’ll run around to the baker’s, myself, and get a loaf. I’ll say that I left my purse at home (which will be perfectly true, and, under the circumstances, eminently sensible!) and that they can charge it. Keep an eye on the steak, Ernie, and the fire. I’ve just put on a couple of sticks of wood.”
“All right,” answered Ernie, from where she sat on the table, dejectedly swinging her legs and muttering over an open Geography. “I’ll watch it.”
Yet when I returned from my errand some few moments later it was to find the kitchen full of smoke. In the middle of the floor pranced Ernie, frantically blowing upon a smutty and spluttering gridiron, while the red flames leapt hungrily through the open top of the stove.
“What have you done?” I cried, snatching the gridiron from Ernie’s blackened fingers. “That steak is burned to a cinder! It’s Friday night. There isn’t any more money. Do you realise what this means?”
“Oh dear! oh dear! I was bounding the British Isles!” wailed Ernie. “And the fire didn’t come up,—till all of a sudden everything began to blaze! Of course, I realise, Elizabeth. Can’t we scrape it, or something?”
“No,” I answered, transferring the hopelessly charred bit of steak to the big blue platter. “It is burned quite through,—and to-morrow is Saturday. How can we expect Miss Brown to keep on paying seven dollars a week,—once she finds out that we are unable to feed her?”
“Then chop off my head and boil it for her old dinner,” sobbed Ernie, entirely overcome by this last, unlooked-for disaster, for which she could not but hold herself responsible. “Nobody’d miss it,—about the house, I mean,—and they used to eat such things once,—in the British Isles!”