There were children playing in the street, poor little children, boys and girls, whose only play-ground was that hot and dusty place. But in the person of one, the quick eye of the artist detected extraordinary beauty, though decked in rags almost as extraordinary.
The unconscious child was a girl, six or seven years of age, faultless in form and feature, the very embodiment of one of Martin Gray’s ideals.
It was not solely the exquisite loveliness of the child’s face, though the shape and coloring were perfect—but beside the dark rich hair, which fell in such unheeded profusion on the shoulders of its little mistress—and beside the deep, sapphire-blue of the large languid eyes, and the classic regularity of every feature, there was an expression, a soul look, which intensified her natural beauty, and stamped her as the owner of an intellect whose range was far higher than that reached by any of her playmates.
“Tell me your name, little angel,” said the artist, in the excitement of his delighted surprise.
“My name is Alice Flynn,” was the prompt answer, accompanied by a smile and frank look of inquiry, which read very plainly “what is your name—and what do you want of me?”
“Have you a mother? Where does she live? Go with me to your home—I must speak with her.”
The child answered these queries by at once leaving her playmates—the artist followed her quickly, and in a few moments they entered a narrow byway. Passing a short distance through it, little Alice paused before a shabby old frame house, which seemed every day on the point of bidding an eternal farewell to all things terrestrial.
“This is the place where we live, sir,” she said, with the sweetest voice in the world; “will you come in?”
“The little girl is yours, ma’am, I believe,” said Martin, as he stood in the presence of what seemed to him an ogress—a gigantic woman who certainly could lay but little claim to beauty, when compared with the “child-angel” who called her mother.
“Yes—she wasn’t lost was she? Or was she up to mischief in the street, just tell me that?”