“Muvver! Muvver!” she shouted, clapping joyful hands. “I can see Mrs. Porridge in the street, and she’s talking to a policeman.”
Nancy jumped up, and ran to the window.
“Why, so it is! Dear, dear Mrs. Pottage! I’ll go down and open the door.”
“There you are!” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed triumphantly to the policeman after she had embraced Nancy. “Didn’t I tell you my lady friend lived here?”
The policeman strode off with a good-natured smile: the small boy took the mouth-organ out of his pocket and, after watching the policeman safely through the archway of the Tavern, resumed his interrupted tune. The two little girls, without looking to see if the sugar-smeared neutral was ready to be dragged on again, moved forward on their way. The three other small boys discovered a new method of wearing out boots and set off to practise it. Mrs. Pottage and Nancy retired into Number Five. Blackboy Passage was once more abandoned to its Sabbath emptiness and silence.
“Well, you do live in a Punch and Judy show and no mistake,” Mrs. Pottage declared, as she followed Nancy up the stairs, the jet bugles of her best bonnet tinkling and lisping as she moved.
“My landlady doesn’t like being called down to open the door; and the girl’s out,” Nancy explained.
“Landlady you call her? Skylady I should call her. That is if I called her a lady at all, and which I most certainly never shouldn’t not if I lived to be as old as Methussalem.”
Letizia was waiting at the head of the stairs to welcome Mrs. Pottage, into whose outspread arms she flung herself in a rapture of welcome.
“Mrs. Porridge! Mrs. Porridge!”