“Did you say a poor child?” asked Gypsy.
“Yes,” said Ginger. “I gave it sixpence change. It was so extremely under twelve, you see. It said it would come again to ask the weather next Sunday and bring its cousins.”
“Well, it’s going to be disappointed,” said Gypsy. “Though how we’re to take tickets to hay and corn on fivepence halfpenny, I don’t quite know. We shall have to walk; unless we stay over to-morrow and put in a really hard day’s work and earn our fares. What do you say to that?”
“Oh yes,” said Ginger, “and then we can give a party to-night and say good-bye to everybody.”
So they settled down to put in a really hard day’s work. The day helped them a lot. It was a sultry, many-minded day; it did a variety of things with heavy heatwaves to begin with, and then it muttered in the distance, and shed a few big drops, and slacked off for a bit; then it rolled up a lot of dark blue clouds, and then a lot of black ones. Mr. Morley came over from his hotel to say that it was so dark in the Reading Room that the visitors couldn’t read, and he wanted Gypsy’s advice about turning on the electric light. Gypsy, half in and half out of his door, looked at the sky and said:
“I think you’d better turn it on.”
Mr. Morley thanked him, and tipped him half-a-crown (they do it handsomely at Morley’s).
“Can I have it in pennies?” asked Gypsy.
“Certainly,” said Mr. Morley. He counted thirty pennies into Gypsy’s hand, and crossed the road.
Then quite suddenly a blue cloud hit a black one, and Gypsy leapt out of his door as far as he could go, and the hail came down like peas and rattled in a box by the theatre-men. So Gypsy called “Hi! hi!” very loudly, and Mr. Morley, who had just got under the portico, came out and crossed the road again.