"The washer-woman, miss; and she lost your ma's best pocket-handkerchief, and very likely would have had to gone to prison, and been hung" (oh, Susan! Susan! that was a dreadful stretch of imagination on your part), "only her little girl Norah's doll fell down, and when they picked it up it was a-pointing in the corner, and there was the pocket-handkerchief; and Norah she says she's sure she done it a purpose."
"Why, of course she must have. What a dear delightful doll! I think, Susan, really, that I should like to see her. May I?"
"La, miss, of course you may. I'll tell Mrs. O'Flannigan to bring her."
Ah, little did Sophonisba Sylvia guess where she was going that evening when Norah wrapped her carefully in a corner of her shawl, and trotted off by Mrs. O'Flannigan's side through the gas-lit streets! They went in by the kitchen steps—a way Miss Tudor had never been before; but somehow the great tiled hall looked strangely familiar; and who was that coming a little timidly out of a door held open by a tall and powdered footman?
Ah, dear Young People, it is as hard to write of joy as of sorrow. Ethel's shriek rang through the house, and brought her papa, Sir Edward, from his billiards, and Lady Ponsonby from her drawing-room, in a tremendous hurry.
Norah went home happy in the possession of five dolls out of Ethel's twenty-three, and her good fortune did not stop there. Indeed, she had the greatest reason to bless the day when Miss Sophonisba Sylvia Plantagenet Tudor had her eventful fall from the Ponsonby carriage at Hyde Park Corner.