“Yes, sir, Miss Madge told me so, and I am going there soon!”
“Are you? That is right! You look as if you would be the better for a holiday.”
“I didn’t ought to want it; I had such a beautiful one up at your house. But the streets do get so hot, and I just think and think and think about what Miss Madge told me of the place I was to go to. Mother says I’m a lucky girl, and I think I am too! I can think about it all day, and then when it’s night I often dream about it too. I wonder if it’ll be like the dreams when it comes? They’re so beautiful, they are!”
“Miss Madge will keep her promise—you needn’t be afraid!” said Bertram, as he put a shilling into the child’s hand and passed on. He was very busy just then, but he found time to feel a real sense of pleasure that his sister should remember their little protégée, and arrange a country outing for her. He had been a little afraid that the experiment of transplanting her for a time had not been entirely successful. And the child’s appearance when first he saw her had been a shock to him, she had looked so frail and white.
“But I will tell Madge to keep her for a really good outing when she does get her,” he said to himself as he went on his way. “The child looks as though she needed it. She is not of the stuff of the average street waif. I will bear the expense of some extra weeks. Perhaps when Madge settles at Brooklands she might find a nook for the little one somewhere.”
Bertram was exceedingly busy just at this juncture, having been away on professional business for some time, and having his own holiday in view not far ahead. Moreover, his daily road did not now lead by Allumette’s corner, and he only saw her by chance once or twice during the week that followed.
Each time he thought she looked more white and wan than the last, and it was with real relief he observed one day that she was missing from her corner at the very hour she was always there to look out for him coming from the Law Courts.
“Ah, then Madge has got her!” he thought with a sense of satisfaction. “She is revelling in the joys of the country. I should like to see her little face light up as she gets out of the smoke of town. I will take care that she does not come back too soon. I will run down to Brooklands one of these days, when I can make time, and see Madge and the Brooks and little Allumette.”
Yet at the very time when Bertram was picturing the child happy in the midst of wild flowers, scented hay, and the glories of summertide in the country, and Madge was busy with her preparations for receiving her later on when the woods should be scarlet and the nuts hanging ripe from the bough, little Allumette was sitting, languid and suffering, pent up in a close and reeking attic with three sick children, all prostrated by a sort of low fever which had broken out in the locality, and which was carrying off little victims by the dozen.
It was not a regularly infectious fever, and it was practically impossible to isolate or remove the sick. Many children recovered after a few days’ prostration, and seemed little the worse, but some died, and others lay helpless and weak for a considerable time, and though the overworked doctor did his best to cope with it, he was able to do but little except offer a few hints as to feeding and treatment, which too often could not be carried out.