“I’ll think it over, lad, and let you know to-night. Here we are at my stand now. Good-bye, Nat dear—oh, and here’s your posy.”
The young man took it with a smile.
“Pin it in for luck,” he said. “Now I’m off I’ll be sure and come round this evening.”
He blew a kiss to Jill, turned a corner, and disappeared.
Her stand was outside a large railway station. Six or seven other girls also sold flowers there, but not one of them could vie with Jill for picturesque arrangement.
She sat down now, and taking up her basket began hastily to divide her flowers into penny and twopenny bunches. This piece of work she generally did at home, but to-day she was late, and had to arrange her wares as quickly as she could while waiting for her customers.
The sun shone all over her as she worked. She made a gay bit of colour, and more than one person turned to look at her. Her black rippling hair was coiled round and round her shapely head. Her turban, too hot for this sultry day, was flung on the ground by her side. Her black dress fitted her slim figure to perfection, and her gay many-coloured apron gave a bizarre effect to her costume, which exactly suited the somewhat foreign type of her face.
The flower girl who eat next her, in her untidiness, her dirt, and almost rags, acted as a foil to Jill. She had bedizened her person in a cheap dress of faded crimson. Her hat, nearly a foot high, was perched on the back of her uncombed hair. It was trimmed with rusty crape and rendered gay with one or two ostrich feathers, and some bunches of artificial poppies.
This woman, between forty and fifty years of age, was, in her way, a favourite. She indulged in a brogue which declared her Irish origin, and whatever the weather, whatever the prospect of the flower-sellers, she always managed to keep the laugh and the ready jest going.