The crowd of gazers was just beginning to scatter, when a white-faced little girl, whose eyes were wide open with terror and dismay, came running up breathlessly from the opposite direction from the one in which the Fair lay. She looked about her distractedly as if she were hoping against hope to see somebody, and then leaned heavily against the wall of the tall grim building as though trying to steady herself.
‘Well, it’s a lesson what happens to bad boys,’ a voice was saying—to the white-faced little girl it seemed to come from somewhere a long, long way off—‘How would you like to go to prison, Jemmy?’
Prison! Oh, then the awful, unbelievable thing had happened! That tall grim house was a prison. It was to prison that she had seen the policeman taking Micky and Diamond Jubilee. ‘Those two little boys who’ve just gone in—in there,’ Emmeline (for she it was) heard herself saying jerkily to the voice which sounded so far away—‘what had they been doing?’
The owner of the voice, a careworn lad who was standing with his little brother almost at her elbow, turned round and stared at Emmeline’s pale, scared face. ‘They were caught at the Fair picking pockets,’ he told her bluntly. It did not occur to him that there was any need to speak with caution of two little street-urchins who could have no possible connection with this well-dressed child.
Emmeline found herself running madly through the streets of Eastwich in the direction of Mary’s house; running as she might have run if Micky had been drowning, or she had been bound on some other errand of life or death. What she expected Mary to be able to do she could not have told—even grown-ups could not rescue people from prison—but the blind instinct of going to her old friend for help in this terrible trouble made her rush on, panting and sobbing, heedless of the many people against whom she knocked and who turned to stare after her in indignant or pitying surprise. She began crossing a road without noticing a tradesman’s cart which was galloping out of a side street; neither did she hear the driver’s horrified shout of ‘Hi!’ as he tried vainly to pull up his horse in time. All she was conscious of was of suddenly being thrown to the ground, and then of a blow on her head and a frightful pain in her arm. Afterwards everything became dark, and she knew no more.
CHAPTER XVI
EMMELINE TALKS THINGS OVER
Emmeline opened her eyes again to find herself half sitting, half lying across the seat of a cab. A strange lady with a grave, kind face was kneeling by her side, holding her arm.
‘Where—’ began Emmeline faintly, breaking off with a groan as the cab gave a jolt and she felt a sudden shoot of pain rather like having a tooth out, only it was much worse, and in her arm, not her mouth.