“Mr. Daniel,” said Jessica, when they were about to separate, and he would not take back his gift of a penny, “if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to come and buy a cup of coffee to-morrow, like a customer, you know; and I wont let out a word about the stall to the minister next Sunday. Don’t you be afraid.”
She tied the penny carefully into a corner of her rags, and with a cheerful smile upon her thin face she glided from under the shadow of the bridge and was soon lost to Daniel’s sight.
CHAPTER VIII.
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
When Jessica came to the street into which the court where she lived opened, she saw an unusual degree of excitement among the inhabitants, a group of whom were gathered about a tall gentleman whom she recognized in an instant to be the minister. She elbowed her way through the midst of them, and the minister’s face brightened as she presented herself before him. He followed her up the low entry, across the squalid court, through the stable, empty of the donkeys just then, up the creaking rounds of the ladder, and into the miserable loft where the tiles were falling in and the broken window-panes were stuffed with rags and paper. Near to the old rusty stove, which served as a grate when there was any fire, there was a short board laid across some bricks, and upon this the minister took his seat, while Jessica sat upon the floor before him.
“Jessica,” he said, sadly, “is this where you live?”
“Yes,” she answered; “but we’d a nicer room than this when I was a fairy and mother played at the theatre; we shall be better off when I’m grown up, if I’m pretty enough to play like her.”
“My child,” he said, “I’m come to ask your mother to let you go to school in a pleasant place down in the country. Will she let you go?”
“No,” answered Jessica; “mother says she’ll never let me learn to read, or go to church; she says it would make me good for nothing. But please, sir, she doesn’t know any thing about your church, it’s such a long way off, and she hasn’t found me out yet. She always gets very drunk of a Sunday.”