"Hush!"
"And when helping her won't ruin us, but get rid of those plagues of boys, John. Fancy our Harriet in the streets like that!"
She pointed to Mattie standing alone there, still under the gas lamp, deep in thought. Mr. Wesden looked, but his lined face was expressive of little sympathy, his wife thought.
"We're hard pushed for a boy—the bill's no sooner down than up again—try a girl, John!"
"If you'll get in out of the cold, Mrs. W., I'll think of it."
Mrs. Wesden retired, and Mr. Wesden kept his place by the open door, and his quiet eyes on Mattie. He was a man who did nothing in a hurry, and whose actions were ruled by grave deliberation. He did not confess to his wife that of late years he had been interested in Mattie; watched her from under his papers in the shop-window; saw her business-like habits, her method, her briskness over her scanty wares, her cleverness even in dodging her bête noire the policeman. He was a man, moreover, who went to church and read his Bible, and had many good thoughts beneath his occasional brusqueness and invariable immobility. A very quiet man, a man more than ordinarily cautious, hard to please, and still harder to rouse.
In shutting up his shop that night, he had caught one or two fragments of the dialogue, and he knew more certainly than his wife that Mattie was being tempted back to the old life. Of that life he knew everything; he had learned it piece by piece without affecting to take an interest in the matter; he even knew that Mattie had long taken a fancy—an odd fancy—to his daughter, that she often inquired about her, and her boarding-school, of Ann Packet, domestic to the house of Wesden.
He thought of Mattie's temptation, then of Mrs. Wesden's extraordinary suggestion. He was a lord of creation, and if he had a weakness it was in pooh-poohing the suggestions of his helpmate, although he adopted them in nine cases out of ten, disguising them, as he thought, by some little variation, and bringing them forward in due course as original productions of his own teeming brain.
And boys had worried him for years—lost his numbers, been behind-hand with the Times to his best customers, insulted those customers when reprimanded, and set the blame of delay at his door, played and fought with other boys before his very shop-front, broken his windows in putting up the shutters, had even paid visits to his till, and surreptitiously made off with stock, and had never in his memory of boys—industrious or otherwise—possessed one civil, clean-faced, decent youth.
"Suppose I had Mattie on trial for a week," he said at last, and looked towards the lamp-post. Mattie was gone—a black shadow, exactly like her, was hurrying away down the street towards the Borough—running almost, and with her hands to her head, as though a crowd of thoughts was stunning her!