'But I can get to school for the afternoon attendance.'
'Madness! With your sister in agony? Have you no feelings? Don't let me see your brazen face before the Sabbath!'
Bloomah crept out broken-hearted. On the way to Becky's her feet turned of themselves by long habit down the miry street in which the red-brick school-building rose in dreary importance. The sight of the great iron gate and the hurrying children caused her a throb of guilt. For a moment she stood wrestling with the temptation to enter.
It was but for the moment. She might rise to the heresy of hot fried fish in lieu of cold, but Becky's Sabbath altogether devoid of fried fish was a thought too sacrilegious for her childish brain.
From her earliest babyhood chunks of cold fried fish had been part of her conception of the Day of Rest. Visions and odours of her mother frying plaice and soles—at worst, cod or mackerel—were inwoven with her most sacred memories of the coming Sabbath; it is probable she thought Friday was short for frying-day.
With a sob she turned back, hurrying as if to escape the tug of temptation.
'Bloomah! Where are you off to?'
It was the alarmed cry of a classmate. Bloomah took to her heels, her face a fiery mass of shame and grief.
Towards midday Becky's fish, nicely browned and sprigged with parsley, stood cooling on the great blue willow-pattern dish, and Becky's neuralgia abated, perhaps from the mental relief of the spectacle.
When the clock struck twelve, Bloomah was allowed to scamper off to school in the desperate hope of saving the afternoon attendance.