The other five Simpson children were scattered among the crowd, the older ones realizing their misfortune, the others enjoying it as a new and startling form of entertainment.
“Well,” said a fireman, as he rather perilously made his own escape from the falling walls, “there she goes! That’s the last of her!” And then all that was left of the building collapsed into the flames, and nothing more of house or furniture could be saved.
For a few moments, everyone was silent, thrilled by the grandeur and awfulness of the sight, for there is always something awesome about uncontrollable flames.
Then the firemen turned their attention to extinguishing smouldering embers. Some of the neighbors started to go home, and others lingered out of curiosity, to see what the Simpsons would do.
“They’ll have to go to the poorhouse,” said one man, unfeelingly; “here comes the overseer now.”
At sight of the overseer, and hearing the unsympathetic remark of the other, Mrs. Simpson’s woe broke out afresh.
“The poorhouse for me!” she cried. “Me, who was a Foster! Oh, don’t let me go there! I’ll work me finger-ends off to keep a home for my childhern, somehow! Oh, if my man could be here with me! Have pity on a poor lone woman. Don’t send me to the poorhouse.”
“But what else can you do?” said the overseer of the poor. He was not unkindly in speech or tone, but he could see no other future for the mother and her seven children. Not one of them was old enough to earn a living, and as Mrs. Simpson had been in sore straits before the fire, surely she was really destitute now.
But the look of agony on her ashen face was so tragic that Marjorie felt her own heart breaking.
“Mrs. Simpson,” she said, “you shall not go to the poorhouse! You shall come home with us!”