“No, sir; none but mother an’ me,” whispered Jack.
“No relations of any kind at all in London?”
“None, sir. We know nobody—at least not many, and they’re all strangers.”
“A sad case,” murmured the surgeon. “Your mother is poor, I suppose?”
“Very poor, sir.”
“But of course you have a home of some sort, somewhere?”
“Yes, it’s not far from here.”
“Well, them, you’d better go home just now, for you can’t see your mother to-night. We dare not let her speak, but come back early to-morrow, and you shall hear about her—perhaps see her. Here, put that in your pocket.”
Poor Jack took the shilling which the sympathetic surgeon thrust into his hand, and ran home in a state bordering on distraction; but it was not till he entered the shabby little room which he had begun to consider “home” that he realised the full weight of the calamity that had befallen him. No mother’s voice to welcome him; no bit of fire in the grate to warm; no singing kettle to cheer, or light of candle to dispel the gloom of rapidly approaching night.
It was Christmas Day too. In the morning he had gone forth with his mother—she in the sanguine hope of renewing an engagement in a clothier’s shop, which terminated that day; he in the expectation of getting a few jobs of some sort—messages to run or horses to hold. Such were the circumstances to which they had been reduced in twelve months, Jack had arranged to call for his mother and walk home with her. On the way they were to invest a very small part of the widow’s earnings in “something nice” for their Christmas supper, and spend the evening together, chatting about the old home in Blackby, and father, and Natty Grove, and Nellie, and old Nell, in the happy days gone by.