Babs pulled a purse out of her pocket. ‘Here’s three and sevenpence halfpenny, and I’ve got ten shillings more in my left-hand corner drawer,’ she said earnestly. ‘Will that be enough, do you think?’
Jean had been thinking deeply. ‘It’s no use giving anything to that scrap of a child,’ she decided. ‘We must go and see his mother first, and find out if his story is true. My father says that indis-indiscrim-in-ate charity does an awful lot of harm. We don’t want to do indiscrimin-ate charity, do we? Come along, you two, and look sharp!’
They clambered over the gate and dropped into the lane, one by one. Barbara was the last, and she almost forgot the solemn reason for their expedition in the thrilling thought that they were going to find out at last where the lane went to. She was quite unprepared for the disappointment she felt when they turned the corner by the old elm tree and the forbidden world beyond burst upon their view. After all, the lane was just the same round the corner, except that it was not quite so interesting, for it grew less grassy as it went on, and finally widened out into a kind of cart-track that was anything but romantic. An enchanted princess might flee with a prince down a grass-grown lane that wound away to nowhere in particular but she would never dream of stumbling over sharp flint stones and splashing through puddles in a common cart-track. The other two did not seem to notice that there was anything wrong with the lane, though; they just kept on straight ahead, with Bobby Hearne shuffling along between them, and Barbara had to run a little to catch them up.
‘Is it far?’ she asked.
‘Oop agin the top end o’ the village,’ explained Bobby, who was fast losing his shyness under the influence of these wonderful young ladies, who carried such funny sticks in their hands, and talked in such a magnificent way about pocket-money.
‘That’s close to the church, on the way up from the station,’ said Jean. ‘Is yours the cottage with the red roof, Bobby, or the one with roses all over it?’
Bobby looked vacant again; he did not recognise his home from Jean’s picturesque description. ‘There be foive pig-styes along of it,’ he announced, after long and careful reflection.
The cart-track brought them to a ploughed field, across which they plodded laboriously, and in the end it landed them in the road that ran right through the village. They met a good many inquisitive glances as they hastened along, for the young ladies of Wootton Beeches very rarely left their own grounds, and certainly never appeared in the village except on their way to and from the station. They found their courage slowly evaporating in the face of the curiosity they provoked, and there was very little of it left by the time they arrived at the cottage with the five pig-styes. Talking about good works in the junior playroom was a very different matter, they found, from carrying them out in a strange cottage, where numbers of strange children came out from dark corners and gaped at them without saying a word of welcome. Babs and Angela pushed forward their leader, and peered over her shoulder as she stood hesitating on the threshold.
‘Hello, mother!’ shouted Bobby, hustling his brothers and sisters out of the way and penetrating into the gloomy recesses of the cottage. ‘Here be three yoong ladies come to see ye.’
A harassed-looking woman came in from the back-yard, and started when she saw the three faces in the doorway. ‘It be proper good of ye, for sure,’ she said, casting nervous glances from her unexpected visitors to a bed that was made up on the floor, near the empty grate; ‘but my girl Lilian Eliza, she be ill, she be, and ye’d best not come in, I reckon.’