drapers, chemist,
fruiterers, and then at last a shop with cakes in the window.

The children stood at the door and peeped in. They saw myriads of white
tables and a couple of sleepy looking girls. One girl held a broom and
was leaning on its handle and surveying the stretch of floor to be
swept. Her eyes at last went to the door, and Betty, seeing they had
been observed walked slowly in, leaving John outside.

"No," said the girl, shaking her head.

"We want some breakfast," said Betty, and added "please," as her eyes
fell on a trayful of pastry on the counter.

Again the girl shook her head.

"Can't give you any here," she said; "now run away."

Then Betty's face flushed; for though one may sing to earn an honest
livelihood and competency, it is quite another thing to be taken for a
beggar.

"We'll pay for it," she said, and then forgot her pride and urged, "Go
on, we're so hungry! We've been walking about since five o'clock."

Something in the child's face touched the girl's heart. She herself had
been up at half-past five and knew a great deal about poverty and
privation.

"Well, come on then," she said. "Go and sit down at one of them tables
and I'll fetch you something."

Betty ran to the door and called "John," in an ecstatic tone, "come on."

Then the two of them chose a table and sat down.

"Not porridge, please," called Betty to the girl. "Just cakes and
things, and lemonade instead of tea. _I'll_ pay the bill."

But John brought out his shilling.

"I'll pay for myself," he said grimly, "and I'll pay you back the penny
I owe you, too."

CHAPTER XVIII

ALMA'S SHILLING

By ten o'clock Betty had made another shilling, having caught the
workers of the city as they were going to their day's toil.

And it must be owned it was a mysterious "something" about the child
herself that arrested what attention she drew. Perhaps it lay in the
fresh rosiness of her face, in the clearness of her sweet eyes, in the
brightness of her young hair; for her courage ebbed away so soon as two
or three were gathered around her; her voice sank to a whisper, she
drooped her head, trifled with one wristband or the other, stood first
on one foot and then on the other, and displayed the various signs of
nervousness Mr. Sharman's stern eye provoked her to.

At eleven o'clock, John, who had made threepence by carrying a bag for
a lady, looked Betty up at the appointed corner and proposed lemonade
and currant b