emakers' establishments. Thus it came about that Madge walked
almost to the end of the street before she found a shop window that
held any objects of the kind for which she was looking. At last she
stopped in front of a small stationer's. There, arranged among the
piles of writing-paper and envelopes, were a quantity of little
ornaments and toys.

Madge was growing rather old to care about regular playthings, and yet
she could not resist the charms of a tiny doll's dressing-table covered
with miniature hair-brushes and combs. She wondered how much it cost,
and whether Betty would want to share it with her.

"John won't care for it, I suppose," she muttered to herself. "At
least he will think it grander to pretend that he doesn't like such a
girlish thing, though I dare say he will always be wanting to play with
it. After all, one can't choose things that will suit everybody, and I
know I could make such a dear little pin-cushion to stand on that
table, with very small pins stuck into it in a pattern. I've got a bit
of silk that would do exactly--Oh! What has happened? Oh, dear! oh,
dear!"

Poor Madge! While thinking over the various ways in which she could
amuse herself with the doll's dressing-table, she had been excitedly
swinging the little brown bag up and down by the string. Five
shillings and sevenpence, mostly in pennies, is rather heavy; an
insecurely tied knot gave way, and the bag suddenly fell with a loud
clatter--not to the ground, that would have been a very bearable
misfortune, but through a grating in the pavement on which Madge
happened to be standing at the moment.

It does not often fall to a person's lot to drop his whole fortune down
a grating into someone else's cellar. It seemed to Madge as if no such
terrible fate had ever overtaken a human being before. If the brown
bag had contained nothing but her own money, she would have preferred
leaving it where it fell, to making a fuss about recovering it. She
could not bear to be thought stupid, and yet it did not seem very
clever to have lost the bag of which she was professing to take so much
care. But as Betty's and John's money had also disappeared down the
dark grating, it seemed quite hopeless to hush the matter up. They
would naturally question her until they found out the truth, and then
loudly express their opinion of her selfishness if she had not made
every possible effort to recover their missing property.

Madge looked