“Oh, Sam, it’s very, very sad,” sobbed Mrs Jenkles again; “and her so young. If it had been her mother or me!”
“Stow that, old gal,” said Sam, with a choke. “If there’s e’er a woman as can’t be spared outer this here wicked world of pore cabmen and hard fares, it’s you. What’d become o’ me?”
“Oh, Sam,” sobbed Mrs Jenkles from inside her apron.
“I should go to the bad in a week, old gal. I should never pass a corner public without dropping in; and at the end of six months there’d be a procession o’ cabs follering a subscription funeral, raised by threepenny bits and tanners; and every cabby on the ranks’d have a little crape bow on his whip in memory o’ Sam Jenkles, as drunk hisself to death.”
“Don’t, pray, Sam,” sobbed his wife.
“It’s true enough, missus; and I b’lieve the chaps ’d be sorry; while as for old Ratty, I b’lieve he’d cry.”
“Sam!” sobbed his wife.
“I wonder,” said Sam, dolefully, “whether they’d let the old ’oss follow like they do the soldiers, with my whip and boots hanging one side, and my old ’at on the other. Sh! here’s Mrs Lane.”
“Mrs Jenkles,” cried their lodger, hurriedly, “go and ask Mr Lloyd to come over. She wants to see him.”
“Is she worse, ma’am?”