“Got a mother?” she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
“And do you think yourself better than she is?”
The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the Dials. “I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't,” he answered, in swift, rasping accents. “She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave—” “Go home!” she bade him, peremptorily—and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the shop.
Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book—the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history—but loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others. Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters—for what reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise, she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop.
It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. “Do mind what you're about!” she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
“Shut up the place!” he answered, with lordly geniality. “I've walked all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion—I couldn't have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!”
“There isn't any fire down here,” she said, apologetically, as they edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. “The old fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find it too cold—do you?—with your coat on? Or would you rather come upstairs?”
“Never mind the cold,” he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before the desk. “I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've done today?”
Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light. His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned a new authority.