"No," said Uncle Geoff, "if he keeps warm and out of the draughts. Mrs. Partridge will come up to see him; but you needn't be afraid, Audrey, I'm not going to say anything about last night to her. You and I have made an agreement, you know."
Mrs. Partridge did come up, and she was really very kind—much kinder than she had been before. She was one of those people that get nicer when you're ill; and besides, Uncle Geoff had said something to her, I'm sure, though I never knew exactly what. Any way she left off calling us naughty and telling us what a trouble we were. But it was all thanks to Miss Goldy-hair, Tom and I said so to each other over and over again. No one else could have put things right the way she had done.
Tom was very good and patient, though his throat was really pretty bad and his head ached. Mrs. Partridge sent him some black currant tea to drink a little of every now and then, and Uncle Geoff sent Benjamin to the chemist's with some doctor's writing on a paper and he brought back some rather nasty medicine which poor Tom had to take every two hours. But though I did my very best to amuse him, and read him over and over again all the stories I could find, it seemed a very long, cold, dull morning, and we couldn't help thinking how different it was from what we had hoped for—spending the day with Miss Goldy-hair, I mean.
"If only we hadn't gone out in the cold last night you'd have been quite well to-day, Tom," I said sadly.
"Yes, but then we wouldn't have found Miss Goldy-hair," said Tom.
"I don't see that it's much good to have found her," said I. I was rather dull and sorry about Tom, and I didn't know what more to do to amuse him. "I don't believe we'll see her for ever so long, and perhaps she'll forget about us as she has such a lot of children she cares for."
"But they're poor children," said Tom, "she can't like them as much as us. She said so."
"She didn't mean it that way," I said. "She'd be very angry if she'd heard you say that, as if poor children weren't as good as rich ones."
"But she did say so," persisted Tom. "When I asked her if going to see the poor children was as nice as if she had us always, she said no."
"Well, she meant it wasn't as nice as if she was mother and had her own children always. She didn't mean anything about because they were poor. I believe she likes poor children best. Lots of people do, and I'm sure we've lots of trouble too, though we're not poor. If we'd been poor like the ones in Little Meg's Children, or Froggy's Brother Ben, Miss Goldy-hair would have been here ever so early this morning, with blankets and coals, and milk, and bread and sugar—"