"Down in a minute. Going up to clean." Smiling, he passed his wife. On the bottom step Nancy chanted:
"We've had the most lovely mornin', daddy and I. We've been diggin'. We're goin' to dig again. Aren't I dirty, mummy?"
Round the corner of the stairs in the shadow Nancy kissed her father again.
"I'm never goin' to be clean any more," she announced. And you may fancy, if you please, that somewhere in the shadows of the house some one heard those words and chuckled with delighted pleasure.
CHAPTER VI
'Enery
I
Mrs. Slater was caretaker at No. 21 March. Square. Old Lady Cathcart lived with her middle-aged daughter at No. 21, and, during half the year, they were down at their place in Essex; during half the year, then, Mrs. Slater lived in the basement of No. 21 with her son Henry, aged six.
Mrs. Slater was a widow; upon a certain afternoon, two and a half years ago, she had paused in her ironing and listened. "Something," she told her friends afterwards, "gave her a start—she couldn't say what nor how." Her ironing stayed, for that afternoon at least, where it was, because her husband, with his head in a pulp and his legs bent underneath him, was brought in on a stretcher, attended by two policemen. He had fallen from a piece of scaffolding into Piccadilly Circus, and was unable to afford any further assistance to the improvements demanded by the Pavilion Music Hall. Mrs. Slater, a stout, amiable woman, who had never been one to worry; Henry Slater, Senior, had been a bad husband, "what with women and the drink"—she had no intention of lamenting him now that he was dead; she had done for ever with men, and devoted the whole of her time and energy to providing bread and butter for herself and her son.