"What is it? Haven't you got anything to eat?" she asked.
"I shall never want to eat anything again," sobbed the other. "O Elfie, mother's dead!"
"Dead, is she?" said Elfie, but looking as though she could not understand why that should cause any one to cry.
"I shall never be happy again, Elfie. O mother, mother, why didn't you take me with you?" wailed the poor little orphan.
"Just because she didn't want you, I guess," said Elfie, but at the same time sitting down to soothe the grief she could not understand. "There, don't cry," she went on in a matter-of-fact tone. "My mother's gone away, but I don't cry after her; not a bit of it; I know better than that, Susie Sanders."
Susie shrank from her companion's touch as she said this, and thought of what her mother had said about making companions of the children in the street, and half regretted having spoken to Elfie. There was a great difference in the two girls, any one could see, though both might be equally poor. Elfie was unmistakably a street child, ragged, dirty, sharp-looking, with bright cunning eyes shining out of a good-tempered-looking face; while Susie, in her patched black frock and tidy pinafore, and timid, shrinking ways, showed unmistakably that, poor as she might be, there had been some one to love and take care of her. Alas for her, poor child! Her only friend in the wide world had died that morning, leaving her alone in the streets of London.
It was the old, old story: a widow striving to work for herself and her only child, and sinking at last beneath the stroke of disease, after giving up one by one every article of furniture, and moving from place to place, until at last she was glad to find a refuge in the garret of one of these gaunt houses, where she had not lived many weeks before God called her to the mansion he had prepared for her.
She had talked to Susie of this, and tried to prepare the child's mind for the coming of the sad trial; but the little girl had hoped that her mother would get better "by-and-by." And so, when at last she woke up that morning and leaned over her mother, and found that she could not speak, nor even return the caresses lavished on her cold lips and brow, she grew frightened at the unwonted stillness, but yet could not think her mother was dead, until some of the neighbours came in and told her so.
Mrs. Sanders had not made friends with her neighbours, and they had thought her proud, because she did not talk to them of her affairs. And so, beyond telling Susie to go to the overseer of the parish, and ask him to send some one to bury her mother, they did not trouble themselves.
Susie had just been on this errand, and had wandered out again into the street to cry there, when Elfie saw her. They had spoken to each other before, but there had not been much acquaintance, for Mrs. Sanders kept her little girl in-doors as much as possible. But Elfie had taken a fancy to Susie, and resolved to befriend her now; so instead of moving away when she was repulsed, she put her bare grimy arms round Susie's neck, and said—