'O Lord Jesus, please, we come to you this morning. Thank you very much for leaving the Gold City for us. Thank you for coming to be poor, and for loving us, and for dying for us. Please make Betsey Ann love you. Please save Betsey Ann's soul. Please forgive Betsey Ann's sins. Amen.'
'I shall think about it all day; I declare I shall!' said Betsey Ann, as she took off her slipshod shoes and prepared to run downstairs. 'My word! I wonder nobody never told me afore.'
When Rosalie went downstairs that morning, she found her father and the lady of the house in earnest conversation over the fireplace in the best parlour. They stopped talking when the child came into the room, and her father welcomed her with a theatrical bow.
'Good morning, madam,' he said; 'glad to find that you have benefited by your nocturnal slumbers.'
Rosalie walked up to the fire with the kitten in her arms, and the lady of the house gave her a condescending kiss, and then took no further notice of her.
It was a strange life for little Rosalie in the dirty lodging-house, with no mother to care for or to nurse, and with no one to speak kindly to her all day long but poor Betsey Ann.
Clatter, clatter, clatter, went those slipshod shoes, upstairs and downstairs, backwards and forwards, hither and thither. Sweeping, and dusting, and cleaning, and washing up dishes from morning till night, went poor Betsey Ann; and whenever she stopped a minute, her mistress's voice was heard screaming from the dingy parlour—
'Betsey Ann, you lazy girl! what are you after now?'
That afternoon, as Rosalie was sitting reading in her little attic, she heard the slipshod shoes coming upstairs, and presently Betsey Ann entered the room.
'I say,' she said, 'there's a young boy wants to speak to you below; can you come?'