Emily, lurking around, to hear the result of this short interview on the doorstep, was also horrified to think of the disgrace brought on the family by the condition of Franky. "His nails is that black when he come home from school, and often as not his face smudged. What a sight to set in front of Odgers."
"Odgers has got his back to him."
"For all that I'd have liked to scrape the top of the dirt off him. And he've got on the knickers with the patch at the back!"
Mrs. Day, having been up for her tea and retired again to the shop, took her place behind the counter, and dispatched Mr. Pretty to his meal.
No customers came in. She turned her sad and patient eyes upon the street, thinking—not of the cutler's over the way, with whose son Franky had formed such an undesirable friendship, nor of the passers by on the narrow pavement, nor of the tradesmen's carts rattling over the cobble stones; thinking of Bernard on his way to India and untold danger and privations, of Deleah and her dismissal from the school. Her pretty, good child, to have received such shabby treatment! Deleah, who if she had chosen might have queened it over them all. Of her steadily declining business, too, she thought, and of how impossible it was for her to cope with Coman's, down the street. To-morrow was the seventh, the day set apart in each month by Mr. Boult for going into her affairs; looking through her books, catechising her, cross-questioning her, giving her advice in his tyrannical, bullying way. From this her thoughts glanced off to the subject Bessie had held forth upon in her irritating, worrying fashion, through tea.
"It is a pity the child did not have his face washed, certainly," she said.
At last a customer! No, only the cutler's little boy, Franky's chum, from across the way.
The cutler hired a strip of garden on one of the roads, and when tea was over, in the summer evenings, Franky and the cutler's son ran off together to their garden to get into what childish mischief was possible in the restricted space.
"Franky isn't in, this evening," Mrs. Day told the boy. "He's gone for a drive with Mr. Forcus." She gave him a screw of acid-drops for himself, and the boy ran off.
"All ri', thenk ye. Tell Franky I looked in," he called.