in it.  Yet she was quieted by the look Cuckoo cast upon her when the wardrobe had been passed in review and no saleable thing was to be found.  She shrank into a corner, ready for whimpering.  That night Cuckoo did not sleep, and through all the long hours she held Jessie in her arms, and heard, as so often before, the regular breathing of this little companion of hers.  And each drawn breath pierced her heart.

Next morning she got up early.  She was faint with hunger and with a resolve that she had made.  She dressed herself, then carried Jessie to the flannel-lined basket, put her into it and kissed her.

“Go bials,” she said, with a raised finger.  “Go bials.”

Jessie winked her eyes pathetically, her chin resting on the basket edge.  Cuckoo went out into the passage and called down to Mrs. Brigg.

“What is it?” cried Hades.

“I’m going to get some money.”

Mrs. Brigg ran out.

“Money!” she said in a keen treble.  “Where are you going to git it?”

“Never you mind,” said Cuckoo, in a dull voice.

She turned from Mrs. Brigg’s flooding ejaculations and was gone.  In her peregrinations about London she had sometimes encountered in a certain thoroughfare a broad old man with a face marked with small-pox, who wore a fur cap and leggings.  This individual conveyed upon his thickest person certain clinging rats, which crawled about him in the public view while he walked, and he led in strings three or four terriers, sometimes a pup or two.  Cuckoo had seen him more than once in conversation with some young swell, even with gaily-dressed women, had noticed that his terriers here to-day were often gone to-morrow, replaced by other dogs, pugs perhaps, or a waddling, bow-legged dachshund.  She drew her own conclusions.  And she had seen that the old man’s eyes, in his poacher face, were kindly, that his trotting dogs often aimed their sharp, or blunt, noses at his hands and seemed to claim his notice.  Her morning errand was to him.

She walked a long time in search of him, trembling with the fear of finding him, inconsistently.  Her mind, reacting on her ill-fed body, planted a crawling weariness there, and at last she had to stop and examine her pockets.  She came upon two or three pence, went into a shop, bought a bun, and ate it sitting by a marble-topped table.  It nearly choked her.  Yet she knew she needed it badly.  With one penny the less she resumed her pilgrimage.  But nowhere could she see the old man in his leggings, and suddenly a sort of joyful spasm shook her superstitiously.  Fate opposed her cruel resolution.  In a rush of eager contrition she started for home, walking as quickly as her abnormal fatigue would allow her.  She had left the street in which the old man generally walked, and took care, as she turned its corner, not to cast one glance behind her.  She passed through the next street, and the next, and was far away from his neighbourhood, rejoicing, when suddenly she saw him coming straight towards her slowly, the rats resting on his shoulders, various small dogs in strings pattering on each side of him.