What Diamond Jubilee might have answered will never be known, for just at that moment the shopman came back with the fried fish and potatoes, and private conversation was stopped for the time being. Diamond Jubilee threw himself on the food like a ravenous animal, while Micky and Kitty looked on with a fascinated stare. From their point of view, his table manners were quite as well worth watching as those of the elephants they had just been visiting.
Emmeline’s point of view was a more fastidious one, and at any other time she might have been disgusted, but to-day it was with a certain tolerance that she saw Diamond Jubilee put his knife into his mouth. His last words had shed a halo of romance round his unkempt head. It was to children like him that Kathleen had been a good angel.
With that last thought, a plan flashed into Emmeline’s brain—a plan so strange and startling that it almost took her breath away for the moment, and so glorious that it made her want to jump and dance about the shop, only that would have been out of keeping with the dignity of the wonderful plan.
‘Diamond Jubilee, if you have quite done, will you come outside? I’ve something important to tell you.’ Emmeline’s heart was thumping so that she could hardly get the words out.
‘Well, there ain’t nothing more on this here plate,’ said Diamond Jubilee, giving it a final scrape. Perhaps he hoped that she would offer a second helping, but she scarcely even heard what he said.
‘Stop a bit, miss!’ called the shopman, as she seized hold of Diamond Jubilee’s arm, and began hurrying him out of the shop. ‘You haven’t paid, miss.’
‘Oh, bother!’ cried Emmeline, impatiently. ‘I was quite forgetting. How much is it?’
‘Three halfpence, please, miss.’
Her fingers were trembling with excitement as she fumbled for the money in her little brown leather purse.
‘That’ll be right, thank you, miss,’ he said, as she threw it down on the counter.