The child sat her basket down upon the stool which the huckster-woman hastily vacated, and waited patiently while the good dame disappeared in some unknown region of the market, eager to accomplish an object that had just presented itself to her mind.
"Here," she said, coming back with her face all in a glow, a small tin pail in one hand, and her apron gathered up in the other. "Just leave the strawberries, and run home with these. It will be a long time for the old folks to wait, and you will go about the day's work with a lighter heart, when you know that they have had a breakfast, to say nothing of yourself, poor thing! There, run along, and be back in no time."
Julia took the little tin pail and the rolls that her kind friend hastily twisted up in a sheet of brown paper.
"Oh! they will be so glad," broke from her, and with a sob of joy she sprang away with her precious burden.
"Well now, Mrs. Gray, you are a strange creature, trusting people like that, and absolutely laying out money too; I only wonder how you ever got along at all!" said a little, shrewish woman from a neighboring stand, who had been watching this scene from behind a heap of vegetables.
"Poh! it's my way; and I can afford it," answered the huckster-woman, rubbing her plump palms together, and twinkling her eyelashes to disperse the moisture that had gathered under them. "I haven't sat in this market fourteen years for nothing. The child is a good child, I'll stake my life on it!"
"I hope you may never see the pail again, that's all," was the terse reply.
"Well, well, I may be wrong—maybe I am—we shall know soon. At any rate I can afford to lose half a dozen pails, that's one comfort."
"Always chuckling over the money she has saved up," muttered the little woman, with a sneer; "for my part I don't believe that she is half as well off as she pretends to be."
The conversation was here cut short by several customers, who crowded up to make their morning purchases. During the next half hour good Mrs. Gray was so fully occupied, that she had no opportunity for thought of her protégé; but just as she obtained a moment's breathing time, up came the little girl panting for breath; her cheeks glowing like June roses; and her eyes sparkling with delight.