"There's cottages—I didn't think for to ask if they was all white. My! If we could but go there some fine day. Father says it's not so far; many's the time he's walked over there and back again the next morning when he first comed to work here, you see, miss, and his 'ome was still over there like."
"Yes, in the white cottage," said Peggy. She had made up her mind that it was unkind not to "let it be" that the Smileys' father had lived in that very cottage, for he did seem to be a nice man in spite of his bigness and his dingy workman's clothes. If he wasn't nice and kind she didn't think the children would talk of him as they did.
But she spoke absently; Matilda-Jane's words had put thoughts in her head which seemed to make her almost giddy. Brown Smiley stared at her for a minute.
"How she do cling to them cottages being white," she thought to herself, "but there—if it pleases her! She's but a little one." "White if you please, miss," she replied, "though I can't say as I had it from father."
But suddenly a window above opened, and Mother Whelan's befrilled face was thrust out.
"What are ye about there then, and me fire burning itself away, and me tea ready, waiting for the bread? What's the young lady chatterin' to the likes o' you for? Go home, missy, darlin', go home."
The two children jumped as if they had been shot.
"Will she beat you?" whispered Peggy, looking very frightened. But Brown Smiley shook her little round head and laughed.