Sue found the color mounting to her little, weather-beaten face. A fear
suddenly occurred to her that she had been audacious--that this man was
a stranger, that her request was too great for her to ask. But something
in the kindness of the eyes looking straight into hers brought sudden
sunshine to her heart and courage to her resolve. With a burst, one word
toppling over the other, out came the whole truth:

"Please, sir--please, sir, I thought as you might go security fur Giles
and me. We'd pay real honest. Oh, sir, will you, jest because mother did
trusten so werry much?"

"I will, my child, and with all the heart in the world. Come home with
me now, and I will arrange the whole matter with your landlady."

CHAPTER III.

GOOD SECURITY.

John Atkins was always wont to speak of Sue and Giles as among the
successes of his life. This was not the first time he had gone security
for his poor, and many of his poor had decamped, leaving the burden of
their unpaid rent on him. He never murmured when such failures came to
him. He was just a trifle more particular in looking not so much into
the merits as the necessities of the next case that came to his
knowledge. But no more, than if all his flock had been honest as the
day, did he refuse his aid. This may have been a weakness on the man's
part; very likely, for he was the sort of man whom all sensible and
long-headed people would have spoken about as a visionary, an
enthusiast, a believer in doing to others as he would be done by--a
person, in short, without a grain of everyday sense to guide him. Atkins
would smile when such people lectured him on what they deemed his folly.

Nevertheless, though he took failure with all resignation, success, when
it came to him, was stimulating, and Giles and Sue he classed among his
successes.

The mother died and was buried, but the children did not leave their
attic, and Sue, brave little bread-winner, managed not only to pay the
rent but to keep the gaunt wolf of hunger from the door. Sue worked as a
machinist for a large City house.

Every day she rose with the dawn, made the room as tidy as she could for
Giles, and then started for her long walk to the neighborhood of
Cheapside. In a room with sixty other girls Sue worked at the
sewing-machine from morning till night. It was hard labor, as she had to
work with her feet as well as her hands, producing slop clothing at the
rate of a yard a minute. Never for an instant m