The Little Princess of Tower Hill

by L. T. Meade

Tom expended exactly the half of the shilling on his dinner; he ate it greedily, for he was very hungry indeed, and then he went back into the street, with sixpence still to the good in his trouser pocket.

With sixpence in his pocket, and a comfortable dinner inside of him, Tom felt that his present circumstances were delightfully easy. He might walk about the streets with quite fine gentlemanly airs for an hour or two, if he so willed. Or he might flatten his nose against the shop windows, or he might play halfpenny pitch and toss. His circumstances were really affluent, and of course he ought to have been correspondingly happy. The odd thing was that he was not very happy; he could not get Billy's white face out of his head, and he could not altogether forget the icy cold feel of the baby's little arms, when he slipped off that brown winsey frock.

Tom was as hard a boy as ever lived, and a year ago his conscience might not have troubled him, even for playing so wicked a prank as he had done that day. But since then he had met with a softening influence. Tom Jones had been very ill with a bad fever, and during that time had been taken care of in the London fever hospital.

In that hospital, the wild, rough street boy had listened to many kind and gentle words and had witnessed many noble and self-denying actions.

Two or three children had died while Tom was in the hospital, and the nurses had told the other children that this death only meant going home for the little ones, and that they were now safely housed, and free from any more sin and any more temptation.

Tom had listened to the gentle words of the kind Sister nurse, without heeding them much.

But the memory of the whole scene came back to him to-day, all mingled strangely with Billy's pale face and the baby's cold little form, until he became quite compunctious and unhappy, and finally felt that he could not spend that remaining sixpence, but must let it burn a hole in his pocket, and do anything, in short, rather than provide him with food and shelter. Tom was accustomed to spending his nights under archways and huddled up in any sheltered corner he could discover.

This particular night he was lucky enough to find a cart half-full of hay, and here he would doubtless have had a delicious sleep, had not the baby and Billy come into his dreams. The baby and Billy between them managed to give poor Tom a horrible time of it, and at last he felt that he could bear it no longer: he must go and give Billy the sixpence which remained out of his shilling.

He started tolerably early the next morning, and carefully turning his face away from the bakers' shops and coffee-stalls as he passed them, he found himself presently in Aylmer's Court.

He had conquered himself in the matter of the bakers' shops and the coffee stalls, and in consequence he felt a good deal elated, his conscience became easier, and he began to say to himself that very few boys would restore even a stolen sixpence when they were starving. He ran up the stairs, calling out to a neighbor to know if Billy Andersen was within.