Mary opened her hand, and displayed two sovereigns held in its palm. They sparkled in the gaslight. 'The money is my own, father. Take it.' A sudden revulsion of feeling came over Baxendale—he seemed to have passed from despair to hope.—'Child,' he gently said, 'did an angel send it?' And Mary, worn with weakness, with long-continued insufficient food, sad with the distress around her, burst into tears, and, bending her head upon his arm, sobbed aloud.
CHAPTER III. 'I THINK I HAVE BEEN A FOOL.'
The Shucks had got a supper party. On this same Saturday night, when the wind was blowing outside, and the rain was making the streets into pools, two or three friends had dropped into Sam Shuck's—idlers like Sam himself—and were hospitably invited to remain. Mrs. Shuck was beginning to fry the liver and bacon she had just brought in, with the accompaniment of a good peck of onions, and Sam and his friends were staying their appetites with pipes and porter. When Mary Baxendale and her father entered—Mary having lingered a minute outside, until her emotion had passed, and her eyes were dry—they could scarcely find their way across the kitchen, what with the clouds from the pipes, and the smoke from the frying-pan. There was a great deal of laughter going on. Prosperity had not yet caused the Shucks to change their residence for a better one. Perhaps that was to come: but Sam's natural improvidence stood in the way of much change.
'You are merry to-night,' observed Mary, by way of being sociable.
'It's merrier inside nor out, a-wading through the puddles and the sharp rain,' replied Mrs. Shuck, without turning round from her employment. 'It's some'at new to see you out such a night as this, Mary Baxendale! Don't you talk about folks wanting sense again.'
'I don't know that I ever do talk of it,' was the inoffensive reply of Mary, as she followed her father up the stairs.
Mrs. Baxendale was hushing a baby when they entered their room. She looked very cross. The best-tempered will do so, under the long-continued embarrassment of empty purses and empty stomachs. 'Who has been spreading it up and down the place that we are in trouble about the rent?' she abruptly demanded, in no pleasant voice. 'That girl of Ryan's was here just now—Judy. She knew it, it seems, and she didn't forget to speak of it. Mary, what a simpleton you are, to be out in this rain!'