“Oh,” said Dolly, “stockings are cheap, I think—besides we could go without them altogether; the little girls who came selling holly had no stockings on at all.”
Phyl, tied to bed, could not economize in this way, but when Harriet ran up with her eleven o’clock lunch-tray she only ate half the bread to her beef-tea, and did not touch the arrowroot biscuits. “Here,” she said, gathering them up carefully, “put them in the box quickly, Dolly, before Harriet comes back, or she’ll make me eat them.”
Dolly got out the old bonnet-box, that until the last few days had held their patches of materials for dolls’ clothes. It was half full of broken victuals,—bits of cake, bread, a jar with butter in it, quite a quantity of sugar that they had saved instead of having it in their tea; even a couple of mutton-chops.
This was to provide against the coming days when they would be starving in the streets of London, and was to be brought out as a beautiful surprise to their mother when she was tired out one day and hopeless of getting food for dinner.
Phyl and Dolly sketched the future with dark [83] ]enjoyment on their faces, and Weenie listened aghast.
Their mother, of course, would strive to earn a livelihood by singing in the snowy London streets, Weenie in her arms, themselves beside her trying to sell bunches of violets or watercress, or even shoelaces. Sometimes the passers-by would put pennies into their mother’s hand, or buy their own wares, but sometimes no one would take any notice of them at all, and they would go home at length to a dark, damp cellar, and divide a crust of bread amongst them, and sleep on the old floor beneath sacks.
At this point in the pleasing prospect Weenie used to cry dismally, and their own eyes would fill with tears of self-pity.
They would pursue it a little further, however; their clothes would grow more and more ragged, and the wind would whistle through them, and chill them to the bone; they would all be barefoot, their boots having worn out and their stockings gone long since; and they would all have such hacking coughs that the passers-by, hurrying away to their rich, luxurious homes, would occasionally fling them a glance of pity. And at last a benevolent old gentleman would be passing by, and touched at their distress would put his hand hastily in his pocket and bring out a coin which he would slip into their mother’s hand with the words, “Here’s a shilling for you, my poor woman,” and when he got some distance away they would [84] ]discover he had given them a sovereign in mistake. And the mother would sternly put away the temptation to buy food and clothes for her starving children with it, and bid Phyl and Dolly run after him and tell him of the mistake. And they would catch him at last, and tendering the glittering gold back to him would tell him of his error. And he would be so overcome with their honesty that he would take them by the hand and go back to their mother and ask questions of her,—what was her name?—why was she in such great distress? And when he heard the name he would lean up against the lamp-post quite overcome; and when they asked him what was the matter he would answer that he was their father’s long-lost brother, and had been searching for them for years, as he was immensely wealthy and did not know what to do with his money. And thereupon he would adopt them all, and they would all live happily to the end of their days.
“Then why doesn’t mama tell Dadda’s bruvver now?” demanded the practical Weenie.
Phyl and Dolly glanced at her impatiently. That the father had no brother, long-lost or otherwise, was a detail they had not troubled about.