viii

"Here, have a chocolate, ma," said Sally. Mrs. Minto was sitting beside the empty grate reading, with the aid of a magnifying glass, a piece of newspaper which had been wrapped around Sally's mended shoes. She looked very frail and meagre, but she was very much better than she had been, and but for the ugliness of the room and the drabness of her clothes she would not have appeared miserable. She was, in fact, a pathetic figure; but thanks to Sally they were no longer starving, or in immediate danger of it.

"Chocolates!" cried Mrs. Minto. Then, sternly and suspiciously, she said in her weak voice of warning, "Where did you get them from, Sally?"

"Won 'em in a raffle," declared Sally.

"Oo, gambling!" reproved Mrs. Minto. "It's very wrong of young girls——"

"Fiddlesticks! They're good chocolates, too," said Sally. "Don't make yourself sick. It's a nuisance. Besides, I want some myself. I am hungry. I've been working all the evening."

"Working!" grumbled her mother, incredulously.

"Well.... I ... have!" asserted Sally. "Perhaps you'd like me to get Miss Summers to give me a certificate? You'll see. I shall have a bit more money at the end of the week. Then you'll rub your eyes. You'll apologise—I don't think! No, I'm a bad girl, wasting my time gadding about. You never think of that when you get the money, or the money if I'm late."

"Hush! Hush!" begged her mother. "I never said you was a bad girl. You're a very good girl. But when you bring home a box of chocolates at this hour—nine o'clock, and past—and say you won them in a raffle, and you've been working—well!"

"What's that you're reading?" asked Sally, pointing to the small print.

Mrs. Minto straightened the sheet of newspaper, and held it up to the light.

"It's an old paper," she said. "A trial."

"Lor! Murder?" Sally almost left her supper. "What's it all about?"

"Well ... oo, he must a been a wicked wretch. He poisoned the old lady. He'd robbed her before he did it. Took all her money to give her an annuity, and then he poisoned her."

"Poison! Whew! What sort of poison?"

"Flypapers, it was. Not them sticky ones, but the brown, what you put in water. Got arsenic in them, they have."

"What's arsenic?"

Mrs. Minto looked over her magnifying glass at Sally in a bewildered way.

"I don't know. It's poison. I never poisoned anybody. Not that I know of."

"No," agreed Sally. She thought to herself: "She ought to have poisoned dad. All of us." Melancholy seized her, a dreadful passing fit of depression. Suddenly she longed for Toby. Aloud, she proceeded, more seriously: "If it's in the flypapers, why don't we all get poisoned, ma?"

"Well, it seems he soaked the papers, and drained off the water, with the poison in it, and mixed it with her food—beef tea, and that. She never noticed anything. She had awful pains, and diarrhœa, and was sick; and then she died, poor thing."

"Hn," said Sally, reaching out for the chocolates. "I'll read it. I like murders."

"Hush!" cried Mrs. Minto, in horror. "Read them—yes; but say you like murders! What wicked people there are in the world, to be sure. I hope they hanged him."

"Doesn't it say?" mumbled Sally, dealing with a chocolate with caramel inside it.

"It's torn across. It's what I got your shoes in, Sally. It's a.... It's 'Stories of Famous Trials,' in the Weekly Something.... I can't see what it is."

For the next quarter of an hour Sally ate chocolates and read about the trial of Seddon for murdering Miss Barrow.

"Miss Barrow!" she exclaimed. "Wonder if she was any relation to old Perce! I'll ask Mrs. Perce about it. Oo—fancy Tollington Park! Quite near us in Hornsey Road."

Mrs. Minto shuddered, and looked furtively at the clock, longing for her bedtime. Sally caught the glance, shut up the box of chocolates, and folded the paper.

"You going to work?" asked her mother.

"Wash my hair."

"You're always washing ... washing, you call it!" cried Mrs. Minto.

Sally ignored the sneer, and proceeded to her occupation. There was a silence. Mrs. Minto yawned. She looked at Sally making her preparations, and into her face came a watchful anxiety that was mingled with profound esteem. There was a chic about her girl that made Mrs. Minto assume this expression quite often, and Sally knew it. She knew it now, and was elaborately unconscious of it. As she waited for the kettle and moved the lamp so that it would illumine the washstand, she whistled to show how blind she was to any sign of emotion from her mother. When the whistle was unavailing, she said sharply:

"Don't you think this is a pretty frock, ma?"

Mrs. Minto sighed heavily, and pulled herself up out of her chair.

"Far too pretty, if you ask me," she said. "Looks to me fast." She was full of concern, and did not try to hide it from Sally.

"Oo!" cried Sally. "You are stupid, ma!" And with that she whipped the dress over her head and revealed the fact that she wore no petticoat. Her mother was the more outraged.

Sally began to sing.

"'When you and I go down the love path together,

Stars shall be shining and the night so fair.'"

"Well, it's a good thing nobody else sees you like that," sniffed her mother, rebukingly. "I don't know what they would think!"

Sally forebore to make the obvious retort. Her mother prepared for bed.