"I don't know how to do anything else," replied Cybele, the blood rushing to her cheeks; "my aunt is sick, and I want to get some money."
"Tush!—always sick!" replied the boy, contemptuously; "how silly! I wonder the beggars don't all die some day, they've been sick so long!"
"We are not beggars!" said Cybele, raising her head somewhat proudly, and preparing to move away. "If you don't want the broom, I'll take it, if you please."
The boy seemed half pleased, as he looked at her, and said:
"Proud, too—if it isn't funny! Here, don't go away—I want to hear your tambourine."
So she laid down her bundle of brooms, and, arranging her tambourine, played him some merry tunes.
"Can't you dance, too?" asked the boy, when she had finished. So she danced and played to
him; and, when she stopped, he placed a penny in her hand, and coolly walked away.
She looked at the penny lying in her hand, and then after the boy, who was walking up the street, and she couldn't help thinking how very little it was, and how she hoped he would have given her more. She looked at the little broom he had ruined, and everything seemed sadder than before. Then, by some strange freak, her mind ran off to the gardens where her mother slept, as it always did when darkness gathered round her, and she longed, more than ever before, to throw herself on the ground there, and quietly sleep a long, long time. During the whole day she had received but a few pennies; so few, they would not induce a doctor to go down to her sick aunt. If she only could have met some kind heart, which would have gone home with her, and given kind words and soothing draughts to the sick one! But it was not brought into her path.
When she came home and saw how much worse her aunt was than when she had left her in the morning, her little heart grew sick; and Cybele, who had seen her mother grow thin and die,