"Are you the head lady of the Charity?" she asked the lady at the desk.
Miss Margery answered that she was.
"If you please, ma'am, we don't want to be put away," Peggy announced.
"Who wants to put you away? Tell me about it," said Miss Margery.
"The folks over there." The girl nodded her head vaguely. "They say as how mommer can't take care of us—popper he's got to go to the work'ouse again. He wa'n't so very drunk this time but the judge sent him there—mean old thing! And they say mommer can't take care of us and we'll have to be put away in 'sylums. And we don't want to go. She says if the Charity folks will help with the rent, we can get on. Don't none of us eat much and we can do with terrible little," Peggy concluded breathlessly.
"What is your name? where do you live? I shall have to see your mother and talk to her," said Miss Margery.
"My name's Peggy Callahan and we live out that way," waving her hand northward. "There ain't no number to the house. You go down this street till it turns to a road and you come to a gate marked 'No Thoroughfare' and you go straight through it and follow the path and you come to a little brown house with red roses on the porch. That's our house. Oh! there's two with roses! One is a colored lady's. Ours is the one with the so many children."
"I know your mother. And I remember the place," said Miss Margery, writing a few lines in her notebook. "I am going out that way this afternoon and we will see what can be done."
"Thank you, lady," said Peggy, and bounded away.
"I'd better send you home, Anne," said Miss Margery, with a little sigh, "and let you go with me some other time. This place is a long way off, much farther than I had expected to go this afternoon."