"Oh, Nelly, you are just the person I was wanting to see! Alice has taken this time, of all others, to sprain her ankle; and Miss Cameron must needs go and be married!" said Mrs. Kirkland, as if marriage were an unheard-of transgression, invented for her express annoyance. "Miss Powell and myself are all alone; and you must take hold and help us. Just get out the buttons for that lady. You know where they are."
Nelly complied, and plunged at once into the button business, and the braid business, and the pin business, and endless other businesses, surprising herself by the ease with which she remembered the places and prices of things. She now and then found herself at a loss in calculating and making change; but Miss Powell was at hand to help her, and on the whole she made out very well, and gave satisfaction to her customers.
Mrs. Kirkland found Nelly so useful that she could not spare her to go home to dinner; so she stayed, and had her luncheon with Miss Powell, on bread-and-butter and cold ham and chocolate, which Alice Kirkland sent down to her mother. She could not get away till dark, and then went home with a strict injunction from Mrs. Kirkland to come back in the morning as soon as she had carried round her milk.
"What a useful, handy little creature she is!" said Mrs. Kirkland. "She is worth more than any young girl I ever had. Who would have believed, when she came in to return that pattern, early last spring, that we should be so glad of her help in the store?"
"Nelly had one grand advantage to begin with," said Miss Powell. "She was brought up to be strictly honest,—never to meddle with the least thing which does not belong to her. She owes her grandmother an immense debt of gratitude for that part of her education, at least."
"Yes, indeed. It is wonderful how few girls are to be trusted. They may not take large sums or things of much consequence, but they are always meddling. The servant I have now is good for a great many things; but she constantly helps herself to tea and sugar, and to my thread, needles and pins. Yet, if I should send her away, it is ten to one the next comer would be worse,—would have all her faults, without her good qualities. People often talk of common honesty; but I sometimes think strict honesty the most uncommon thing in the world."
"I have watched Nelly closely, and I have never seen her take the smallest trifle. She sometimes asks if she may have empty boxes or bits of tinsel and ornamental paper; but I have never seen her appropriate any such thing without leave."
Granny Ryan grumbled not a little at Nelly's long absence, and still more at her going away again the next day. She complained of the loneliness of being by herself from morning till night. But the truth was, she began to grow somewhat jealous of Nelly, and to feel as though the child was getting above her. Almost every one who has tried to benefit children of Nelly's class has met with this feeling, and found it a great hindrance. People do not like to have their children better off than themselves.
Mrs. Ryan was not so bad in this respect as many others that I have met; but she could not help a spasm of jealousy now and then. She raised numberless objections to Nelly's going to the shop,—her own loneliness, Crummie's needs, and the necessity of Nelly's going after the slops for her.
But Nelly disposed of all in one way or another. She knew that Mrs. Kirkland needed her services; and she felt, rather than thought, that this was a turning-point in her life,—that on her action now it depended whether she were to grow up intelligent, respectable and comfortable, or whether she should live, like her mother and grandmother, just contriving to keep soul and body together, and tolerated by neighbours and acquaintances because no one knew what to do with them. She felt that a permanent place in Mrs. Kirkland's store was the summit of all her wishes; and she began to see that such a place would presently be incompatible with the care of Crummie. But leaving this matter to settle itself, or be settled by time and circumstances, Nelly contented herself with meeting granny's objections partly by reasoning, partly by jokes and coaxing, ending with—