"I 'spect she can't afford good butcher's meat," said Mrs. Beale; "but your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he'd like you to have your fill of something as'll lay acrost your chesties." So she made a Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.
After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than we had felt for days, and Dora said—
"Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I wish we could do something to help her."
"We might go out street-singing," Noël said. But that was no good, because there is only one street in the village, and the people there are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.
Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this would never do.
Then suddenly a thought struck some one—I will not say who—and that some one said—
"She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch."
That was the beginning of it. The end—for that day—was our getting the top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.
LODGINGS TO LET.
ENQUIRE INSIDE.
We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.