y looked where he pointed, saw Millicent on
the island in the middle of the roadway, and called to her.

Millicent turned her head and looked at them with somewhat dazed eyes.
Her face did not as usual light up at the sight of the Lump. She
crossed the road to them feebly.

"How are you? Why haven't you come to the classes for so long?" said
Pollyooly.

"Mother's dead," said Millicent dully; and her big eyes which had been
so dull, shone suddenly bright with tears.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Pollyooly pitifully; and as she gazed
anxiously at Millicent's seared and miserable face, her eyes grew moist
with tears of sympathy.

Millicent stooped and kissed the Lump listlessly, almost mechanically.

"And what are you going to do?" said Pollyooly with grave anxiety.

She understood fully the seriousness of Millicent's plight.

"I'm going to the workhouse," said Millicent dully.

Pollyooly clutched her arm. It was impossible for her to turn pale for
she was always of a clear, camelia-like pallor; but that pallor grew a
little dead as she cried in a tone of horror:

"Oh, no! You can't go to the workhouse! You mustn't!"

Millicent looked at her with the lack-lustre eyes of the vanquished,
and said in the same dull, toneless voice:

"I've got to. There's nowhere else for me to go to."

The tears in Pollyooly's eyes brimmed over in her dismay and horror at
this dreadful fate of her friend; and she, the dauntless, Spartan
heroine of a hundred fights with the small boys of Alsatia, was fairly
crying.

"You mustn't go! You mustn't!" she cried.

"I didn't want to. I was trying not to," said Millicent slowly.
"After mother's funeral yesterday Mrs. Baker, that's our landlady, said
the relieving officer was coming round this morning to take me to the
workhouse; and I ran away."

"Yes: that was the right thing to do," said Pollyooly in firm approval.

"Yes: I got up very early--just when it was light," said Millicent; and
her voice grew a little firmer. "And I packed my clothes"--she gave
the little bundle she was carrying a shake--"and then I sneaked
down-stairs and out of the house. And oh, the trouble the front door
gave me! You wouldn't believe! First it wouldn't open; and then when
it did, it made noise enough to wake the whole house."

Pollyooly nodded with an air of ripe experience.

"I made sure they'd wake up and catch me and stop me. But they didn't;
and I got out and ran hard out of the street