Therefore Betty grew bolder, and forgot in singing that she was not at the bend in the old home-road, where she had practised once or twice since she had decided upon her career. Her voice rose clearly—shrilly—and sometimes she remembered the tune quite fairly. When she forgot it, she filled in what would have otherwise been a pause with a little bit out of any other tune that came into her head.
For those who would like to know the words of the song she was singing, and who may not have it among their mother's girlhood songs, as Betty had, it may be as well to copy them from the paper she held in her hand to refresh her memory from—
"Please give me a penny, sir; my mother dear is dead,
And, oh! I am so hungry, sir—a penny please for bread;
All day I have been asking, but no one heeds my cry,
Will you not give me something, or surely I must die?
"Please give me a penny, sir; you won't say 'no' to me,
Because I'm poor and ragged, sir, and oh! so cold you see;
We were not always begging—we once were rich like you,
But father died a drunkard, and mother she died too."
Chorus—
"Please give me a penny, sir; my mother dear is dead,
And, oh! I am so hungry, sir—a penny please for bread."
At the end of the first verse she found it necessary to run her eye over the paper before beginning the second.
Perhaps it was just as well for her serenity that she did not look up as she sang. For just as soon as her voice rose into anything approaching a tune—it was near the end of the first verse—a face looked down upon her from the corner window of the second story of the chemist's house.
It was a young face, early old—white and drawn and marked by the unmistakable lines of suffering.
Betty knew nothing about the trouble of the world in those days; nothing of suffering, nothing of sorrow. And the woman above her knew of all. She leaned over the window-sill and her eyes smiled pityingly as they rested on the small bared head.