"The blue lady on the stairs!" Lily said suddenly. Some remembrance of her baby life, some impression that had lain asleep in the utterly changed existence of the last three years, woke up then in Lily's childish brain. She looked round the black little room with bewildered eyes.
"There—to be sure, yes," the woman said in wheedling tones. "And then you was lost, you don't remember about that—" it certainly was better that the child's memory should not revive there—"and then your poor dear papa, he looked for you everywhere, and now me and Dick, we've found you, and if you're a very good child we're going to take you back to him. Yes, little one, we're good friends, me and Dick."
But if any vision of the past had flashed for a moment on Lily's mind, it was soon forgotten. She was cold, she was tired and sick with crying, and she longed for the only home she really knew. So when the woman began again to talk of the beautiful house and all its riches, she turned her head aside with an impatient moan.
"I want John—I want John and mother!"
"Never mind, little missy—don't be naughty now. You'll see them again some day. Now go to sleep like a good girl."
"I must say my prayers."
In a moment she had scrambled down from the bed, and was kneeling on the dirty floor. "Our Father, which art in heaven." Such holy words, such a sweet and silvery little voice, had not often before been heard in that black den of a room. They were very strange to the ears of the poor degraded woman who stood by with the crooked dip candle in her hand, looking down on the fair golden head, the innocent face bent, the little hands reverently put together. She could not have moved or disturbed the child, even if Dick had been thumping on the door.
"O LORD, forgive my faults and comfort poor sinners, and bless all those that love me, for JESUS CHRIST'S sake. Amen."
It was the little form of prayer that Mrs. Randal had taught the child, with a thought in her heart for some distant father and mother who might have lost Lily. To-night she waited a moment, and added quickly out of her own head—"O LORD, please take me back to John."
"You didn't know what you was saying," said her companion, rather grimly, as she tucked her up in bed. "Whatever John may be, he isn't your own father, and it's him you're going back to, my dear."