"Seems to me we're gettin' mighty fine," she said; for Dick was an old customer, and never before had he waited for a pie to be wrapped up.
"Never you mind, old lady," was his good-natured, if somewhat disrespectful, reply; and, dropping some pennies, he seized his treasure and was off again.
Gerty's eager fingers soon held the pie, which Dick dexterously tossed on the bed, and Dick's eyes fairly shone as he watched the half-starved little one swallow the dainty in rapid mouthfuls.
"Oh, I never in all my life tasted anything half so good! Don't you want some?" questioned the child, whose enjoyment was so keen she feared it hardly could be right.
"No, indeed!"—this with hearty emphasis. "I've had 'em. I'm goin' now," he added, reluctantly, "but I'll come back again 'fore long."
"Oh, do!" said Gerty, "an' I'll sing you some more of 'Happy Land,' if you want me; and I know another song, too. I learned them up to the horspital when I was there. You see, I was peddlin' matches and shoe-strings, and it was 'most dark and awful slippery, and the horses hit me afore I knowed it; and then they picked me up, and I didn't know nothin', and couldn't tell where I lived, and so they took me to the horspital; and the next day I told 'em where mother was, and she came. But the doctors said I had better stay, and p'r'aps they could help me. But they couldn't, you know, cos the pain in my back was too bad. And mother, she washes, and I watch the daylight, and wait for night, and sing; and when the pain aint too bad, the day don't seem so very long."
"My eye!" was all Dick could say, as he beat a hasty retreat, rubbing the much appealed-to member with a corner of his ragged coat.
"Well, them's hard lines, anyhow," he soliloquized, as he went to the printing-office. "An' she's chipper, too. Game as anything," he went on to himself. "Now, I'm just goin' to keep my eye on that little un, and some o' my spare coppers'll help her, I guess."
How he worked that night! His papers fairly flew, he sold them so fast; and when, under a friendly street-lamp, he counted his gains, a prolonged whistle was his first comment.
"More'n any night this week," he pondered. "Did me good to go 'thout the pie. Gerty'll have an orange to-morrow."