'Please, sir, won't you give us 'napeny?' said Mick, hopping along with his little deft, bare feet.
'Go away,—for shame, Mick!' cried Dolly again, while Henley impatiently threw some coppers into the road, after which all the children set off scrambling in an instant.
'Oh, Robert, you shouldn't have done that,' cried Dolly, rushing back to superintend the fair division of kicks and halfpence.
Robert waited for her for a moment, and looked at her as she stood in her long grey cloak, with a little struggling heap at her feet of legs and rags and squeaks and contortions. The old Queen Anne railings of the corner house, and the dim street winding into rags, made a background to this picture of modern times: an old slatternly woman in a nightcap came to her help from one of the neighbouring doorways, and seizing one of the children out of the heap, gave it a cuff and dragged it away. Dolly had lifted Mick off the back of a smaller child—the crisis was over.
'Here she comes,' said Lady Sarah, in no way discomposed.
Robert was extremely discomposed. He hated to see Dolly among such sights and surroundings. He tried to speak calmly as they walked on, but his voice sounded a little cracked.
'Surely,' he said, 'this is too much for you at times. Do you go very often?'
'Nearly every day, Robert,' said Dorothea. 'You see what order I have got the children into.'
She was laughing again, and Henley, as usual, was serious.
'Of course I cannot judge,' said he, 'not knowing what state they were in originally.' Then he added, gravely turning to Lady Sarah, 'Don't you somehow think that Dolly is very young to be mixed up with a—rag-shops and wickedness?'