"They have had their breakfast; I told them all about it!" she said, in a panting whisper, drawing close up to the huckster-woman, and handing back the empty pail. "I wish you could have seen grandpa when I took off the cover, and let the hot coffee steam into the room. I only wish you could have seen him!"
"And he liked it, did he?"
"Liked it! Oh! if you had been there to see!"
The child's eyes were brimful of tears, and yet they sparkled like diamonds.
Mrs. Gray looked over her stall to see if there was anything else that could be added to the basket. That pretty, grateful look expanded her warm heart so pleasantly, that she felt quite like heaping everything at hand upon the little girl. But the basket was already quite heavy enough for that slender arm, and the addition of a single handful of fruit or tuft of flowers, would have destroyed the symmetry of its arrangement. So with a sigh, half of disappointment, half of that exquisite satisfaction that follows a kind act, she patted little Julia on the head, lifted the basket from the stool, and kindly bade her begone to her day's work.
The child departed with a light tread and a lighter heart, smiling upon every one she met, and looking back, as if she longed to point out her benefactress to the whole world.
Mrs. Gray followed her with moist and sunny eyes; then shaking the empty pail at her cynical neighbor, in the good-humored triumph of her benevolence, she carried it back to the coffee-stand whence it had been borrowed.
"Strawberries!—strawberries!"
Julia Warren turned pale, and looked around like a frightened bird, when this sweet cry first broke from her lips in the open street. Nobody seemed to hear—that was one comfort; so she hurried round a corner, and creeping into the shadow of a house, leaned, all in a tremor, against an iron railing, quite confident, for the moment, that she should never find courage to open her mouth again. But a little reflection gave her strength. Mrs. Gray had told her that the morning was her harvest hour. She could not stand there trembling beneath the weight of her basket. The fruity scent—the fragrant breath of the violets that floated up from it, seemed to reproach her.
"Strawberries!—strawberries!"