"Tell us all about it, Susie; the boys shan't hit you while I'm here."
To tell "all about it" was just what Susie wanted. No one else had asked about her mother, except the few hard questions put by the overseer, and so she gladly nestled close up to Elfie, and told of her waking that morning to find her mother cold and dead.
A grief like Susie's was quite beyond Elfie's comprehension. Her mother had left her six months before—gone off no one knew where, and no one cared—at least Elfie did not. No one beat her now, she said; and if she was hungry sometimes, it was better to be hungry than bruised, and no one dared to do that now, so that she was rather glad to be left free to do as she pleased. But Susie shook her head very sadly when told she ought to be glad.
"I can't," she said, "though mother told me that God would take care of me when she was gone. I wanted to go with her; and be happy in heaven now."
"And why didn't she take you?" said Elfie, whose ideas about heaven were not at all clear.
"She said I must stay here a bit longer, and do the work God meant me to do."
"What work's that?" asked Elfie.
Susie shook her head. "I don't know, unless it's sewing shirts like mother did," she said.
"Sewing shirts!" repeated Elfie; "People starve at that, and have to sit still too. I'd rather go about and see places, and starve that way than the other," she added, shrugging her shoulders.
"You don't like sewing, then," said Susie. "What do you do, Elfie, to earn money?"