“My child,” he begins feebly, but leaves the sentence unfinished at the sound of a double knock upon the door.
“Ah-h-h!” he cries with evident relief, “here comes your mother; she can tell you how wrong you are.”
And he hastens to admit an old woman, literally lost in an ample old-fashioned cloak, and bearing in her arms a long and apparently heavy bundle.
“Ah,” says the old hypocrite, “here you are at last, after being at the toil of the poor. Come in, old woman, here is our proud girl come to see us.” Then as his eyes rest upon the bundle, he grasps her wrist and hisses in her ear: “You old fool! to bring that here.”
“I had to do it,” she retorts in a whisper; “there are cops in the alleys.”
With a fierce gesture toward the rear door, Papa seizes the bundle, saying:
“Why, it is very heavy; old iron, I suppose; and how horrid those old rags smell. We must take them away, old woman.”
And with a jerk of the head which, evidently, she understands, he turns toward the aforementioned door, and they bear the big bundle out between them.
Perhaps it is the flickering light, perhaps it is her disordered fancy, but as they bear their burden through the doorway, Leslie Warburton half believes that she sees it move. A moment later she starts forward, her face blanched, her eyes distended.
“Oh, am I losing my senses?” she cries, “or did I hear a child’s voice, a voice like my little Daisy’s, calling ‘mamma?’”