Watching her for a few moments, Matty left her.
In passing she stopped and said to Imperence, in a whisper of terrible intensity, “If you speak to that girl again you shall have—no more.”
No more! To be “hanged by the neck till you are dead” would not have sounded so appalling just at that time. So Imperence collapsed.
It is not our purpose to go much further into the details of the feast. Suffice it to say that the poorest of the poor were there; that they were encouraged to eat as much as possible, and allowed to carry away what they could not eat, and there is reason to believe that, judging from the prominence of pockets, a considerable quantity found its way to hungry mouths which had been found incapable of attending the feast.
Among those who did great execution in the pocketing line was, as you may well believe, little Martha. Finding, to her ineffable joy, that there was no limit assigned to consumption, and that pocketing was not esteemed a sin, she proceeded, after stuffing herself, to stuff to overflowing the pocket with which she had previously wrestled, as already described, and then attempted to fill the pocket on the other side. She did so in utter and child-like forgetfulness of the fact that she had recently lost several small articles in consequence of the condition of that pocket, and her memory was not awakened until, having just completed the satisfactory filling of it, she beheld, or rather felt, the entire mass of edibles descending to the floor, proving that the pocket was indeed a very bottomless pit.
“Never mind, little one,” said Tom Westlake, coming forward at the moment, for he had just closed the meeting; “I’ll find a bag for you to put it in. I hope the toe is all right.”
“Oh yes, sir, thank you, it’s quite well,” answered Martha, blushing through the dirt on her face, as she eyed the fallen food anxiously.
“Tell me now, little one,” continued Tom, sitting down on the bench and drawing the child gently towards him, “whom are you pocketing all these good things for?—not for yourself, I’m quite sure of that.”
“Oh dear, no, sir; it’s for gran’father.”
“Indeed. Is grandfather very poor?”