.
But the clown! After all, he could have turned even Jenny's house into
one long surprise. He summed up all Jenny's ideas of enjoyment. She
heard Ruby behind her commenting upon his action as "owdacious." The
same unsympathetic tyrant had often called her "owdacious," and here,
before her dancing deep eyes, was audacity made manifest. How she longed
to be actually of this merriment, not merely a spectator at the back of
whose mind bed loomed as the dull but inevitable climax of all delight.

Then came the episode of the hangman, and the quavering note of fear in
Punch's voice found a responsive echo in her own.

"He's going to be hanged," said Ruby gloatingly.

Jenny began to feel uneasy. Even in this irresponsible world, there was
unpleasantness in the background.

Then came the ghost--a terrifying figure. And then came a green dragon,
with cruel, snapping jaws--even more terrifying--but most terrifying of
all was Ruby's answer to her whispered inquiry:

"Why was all that?"

"Because Punch was a bad, wicked man."

The street so crudely painted on the back of the puppet-show took on
suddenly a strange and uninviting emptiness, seemed to stand out behind
the figures with a horrid likeness to Hagworth Street, to Hagworth
Street in a bad dream devoid of friendly faces. Was a green dragon the
end of pleasure? It was all very disconcerting.

The play was over; the halfpennies had been gathered in. The lamplighter
was coming round, and through the dusk the noise of pipe and drums
slowly grew faint in the distance with a melancholy foreboding of
finality.

Jenny's brain was buzzing with a multitude of self-contradictory
impressions. For once, in a way, she was glad to hold tightly on to
Ruby's rough, red hand. But the conversation between Ruby and another
big girl on the way home was not encouraging.

"And she was found in an area with her throat cut open in a stream of
blood, and the man as did it got away and ain't been caught yet."

"There's been a lot of these murders lately," said Ruby.

"Hundreds," corroborated her friend.

"Every night," added Ruby, "sometimes two."

"I've been afraid to sleep alone. You can hear the paper boys calling of
'em out."

True enough, that very night, Jenny, lying awake, heard down the street
cries gradually coming nearer in colloquial announcement of sudden
death, in hoarse revelations of blood and disaster.

"Could I be murdered?" she asked next day.

"Of course you c