"And if she ever comes to Liverpool and asks for me," says Philip Lacey, "I'll see she's all right. Yes, I will. She shall sell flowers. That'll be better than going about barefoot and getting her poor little foot cut, won't it?"
But at that, for the first time, the child seems to see and to hear. Her eyes, greenish-brown and deep like her mother's, look into Philip Lacey's small but kindly ones as if she had not seen him before. The half-crown Philip has given her is still tightly clasped in her hand, but then half-crowns are things that do sometimes visit people precisely like that. And she knows that they have some mystic power or virtue by means of which they can buy things—green butterfly-nets and red-painted buckets; but Ynys can not quite understand the people who can sell these wondrous things for mere half-crowns.... Then she realises again that somebody has just said something about selling flowers....
They are promising her that if she is a brave little girl and lets Doctor Smythe dress her foot she shall one day sell flowers....
Sometimes, meeting Belle Lovell and her daughter upon the road, the one with her loops of cane upon her back and the other drawing the cart made of the deal box mounted upon perambulator wheels, you will give them good-day and pass on; and then, five minutes or so afterwards perhaps, you will be conscious of an almost noiseless pattering behind you, and will turn. It is Ynys, holding out to you a little posy of hedge-flowers. She may not refuse your penny for them; indeed she will not; but you are not to suppose that it is for the penny that she has brought you the nosegay. The poor sticky little thing is unpurchasable. You would have got it just the same had you been as poor as herself.
PART THREE
I
THE HOLIDAY CAMP
The writer of the Sixpenny Guide to Llanyglo and Neighbourhood, in speaking of the rise of the town, made use of an obvious image which we will take leave to borrow from him. "Thenceforward," he wrote, "Llanyglo sprang up as if by magic out of the soil itself."