Evidently somebody was coming for whom the little one was waiting with eager expectancy. The lips parted in a smile, the eyes began to sparkle and dance, a flush crept into the pale cheek. A moment or two later and another expression swept over the sensitive face, and the child said half aloud—
“Oh, he is not alone! He has a lady with him! Perhaps he will not notice me to-day.”
Evidently much hinged upon this vital point; for the colour came and went in the child’s face, and her eyes were fixed immovably upon a certain face belonging to somebody in that hurrying throng. Her lips were parted in intense absorption, and perhaps there was something magnetic in the fixed gaze, for the successful young barrister, Bertram Clayton, who was walking with his sister through the crowded thoroughfare, paused suddenly just as he drew near to the child, and looking about him said in a pleasant voice—
“Ah, here is little Allumette! I must have a box of matches if they are not too dear to-day!”
The child’s face was rippling all over now. At first his grave bargaining over her wares, and his way of shaking his head over their costliness, had half frightened her, and she had sometimes abated their price, thinking that she must be in the wrong. But now that she had learned by experience that the gentleman always gave her in the end double and treble their value, she was no longer abashed, and entered with a shy spirit into the game of bargains.
Almost always this tall, handsome gentleman was alone. Now and then he had a black-coated, grave-faced friend with him, in which case he seldom stopped to buy matches or speak to the child, but just gave her a passing nod if he caught sight of her wistful face and appealing blue eyes. Never before in her experiences had he been with a lady, and the child’s eyes lighted eagerly as they rested upon the soft fur and bright crimson cloth which composed the lady’s dress.
“What a duck of a child!” she exclaimed to her brother, “I must really give her something!”
The gentleman had finished his bargain and got his matches by this time, and the little girl was smiling over the pennies in her hand. Not that it was the pennies so freely given which made this customer more to her than all the rest put together: it was the kind smile beaming from his eyes, the tones of his voice, the undefined feeling she always had that he looked out for her, and sometimes thought of her when he was elsewhere. For had he not brought her now and then a bag of sweets, or some trifling toy, such as are hawked about in the streets?
By this time the lady had opened her purse, and now held up before the child’s astonished eyes a large piece of silver money that shone brilliantly in the gleam of sunshine.
“Little Allumette,” she said, using the name by which the gentleman always called her—she never could guess why, “do you know what this is?”