"You have not been with those horrid whisky-smelling men?"
"Not seen one of them, Meg."
"Then you may come up," the child would say, taking his hand and leading him up.
Mr. William Standish was beginning life as a journalist. He contributed descriptive articles to a London paper, and was correspondent to a colonial journal. His straight-featured countenance expressed energy and decision; his glance betokened a faculty of humorous and rapid observation; closely cropped blond hair covered his shapely head.
The journalist occupied the rooms on the upper story of Mrs. Browne's lodging-house. He was the single member of the nomadic population sheltering under that decaying roof who lived among his household gods. He had made it a stipulation, on taking the rooms, that he should have them unfurnished, and he had banished every trace of the landlady's belongings.
The child was Meg. She went by no other name. When Mrs. Browne answered her lodgers' queries concerning her, she replied vaguely that the child had been left in her charge. Meg went to an over-crowded school in the morning, and did odd jobs of household work in the afternoon. In the intervals she sat on the topmost stair, watching the social eddies of the shabby miniature world breaking down below. She was a silent child, with a mop of dark brown hair and gray eyes, the gaze of which was so sustained as not to be always pleasant to meet. The gravity of her look was apt to make those upon whom it was directed feel foolish. She repelled the patronizing advances of lodgers, and, when compelled to answer, chilled conversation by the appalling straightforwardness of her monosyllabic replies.
Two events had influenced her childhood. One day, when she was about seven years of age, she had suddenly asked the old servant, who from time immemorial had been the sole assistant of Mrs. Browne in discharging her duties toward her lodgers:
"Tilly, had you a mammy?"
"Lor' bless the child!" answered Tilly, almost losing hold of the plate she was washing. "Of course I had."