He took no apparent heed of her, but proceeded with the task of renovation. Perhaps he had intended still to lead the child's mind to a truer conception of a lady than she could get from worship of this simpering fetish, with a mouth like a cherry, and curled eyelashes; but as he handled the old fashion-plate, the pathos of its smeared and battered condition touched him with a sense of sacredness, and he found himself declaring that her mother might have been like that picture. There was no doubt about it; it represented a lovely creature, and her mother was a lovely lady.
When the task was completed he was rewarded by the sight of Meg's radiant countenance. In perfect peace she carried off the restored picture.
CHAPTER II.
TWO YEARS LATER.
Two years had elapsed, and to superficial observers Meg might have appeared to have changed only by some inches added to her length of limb. She still haunted the corner overlooking the stairs on the topmost lobby, but it was not to watch the come and go of the shabby social eddies breaking down below. She read much to herself. Her choice of literature was a queer mélange of odds and ends. She was up to all the fires, the accidents, the pageants of a world into which she had never set foot. She knew to what corner of a London daily paper and provincial weekly she was to look to find descriptions of these sensational incidents, and the style in which they were recorded stirred in her an admiration worthy of being lavished on Homeric epics. She knew also a number of ballads by heart that she would recite with an amount of native dramatic vividness.
If the shifting scenes going on downstairs no longer attracted her as in the past, she was intent and absorbed in watching one life. The friendship between her and Mr. Standish had become a tie that drew out peculiarities of the child's nature. There had been quarrels, coolnesses, reconciliations, but Meg's usual attitude toward the journalist was one of mingled proprietorship and watchfulness. It was a mixture of motherly solicitude and dog-like faithfulness. She cross-questioned, admonished, and kept vigilant guard over his interests.
Once, having discovered that Mrs. Browne had cheated him of sixpence in the weekly bill, she drew the landlady's notice to the overcharge; but Mrs. Browne refused to acknowledge or set it right, and Meg cried herself to sleep. Loyalty to the landlady was discarded, and with brimming eyes and quivering lips she told Mr. Standish next day of that fraudulent sixpence. To her dismay he laughed, and vowed that Mrs. Browne's name ought to be handed down to posterity as an honest landlady if sixpence covered the amount of a week's cheating. Meg would not be comforted; to her the landlady seemed remorseless.
A mother could not have detected with quicker apprehension a shade of weariness or pallor on the young man's face. Her invariable question on such an occasion would be, "What have you had for dinner?" Sometimes he tried to deceive her. He would roll out a dazzling menu—turtle soup, turbot, plum-pudding.