He went to the bazaar, to see the vicar and to show himself—to make a start on his new war-path. He flung away a pound’s worth of silver on shapeless pincushions and impossible penwipers, and walked through the place, jostled and bored. He had shaken hands with the vicar, and been introduced to a canon and to a rich old lady patroness, and was elbowing his way through a crowd of giggling girls and cane-sucking young men, when a little girl stopped him with a timid request for his patronage.
He looked down and saw a child whom he guessed to be about ten years old—pretty, pale-faced, with soft brown hair and big blue eyes. She held up to him a bunch of violets.
‘Please to buy a bunch of sweet violets, sir.’
He put his hand in his pocket.
‘I’ve got no silver,’ he said.
He looked into the child’s face as he spoke, expecting to hear her say that gold would do.
But the little one had not been trained to the brazen effrontery that leers and grimaces under the coquettishly worn mantilla of charity.
‘Oh, please, if you come to our stall we’ll give you change. Come this way.’
Gurth involuntarily followed the child to a stall in the corner, where a lady was selling flowers.
The lady smiled as the child brought her prize up to be dealt with.