Mark did not feel that he wanted to look through the book again, and he put it away, wondering how long that murmur of voices rising and falling from his father’s study below would continue.  He wondered whether Dora would be annoyed if he went down to the kitchen.  She had been discouraging on the last two or three occasions he had visited her, but that had been because he could not keep his fingers out of the currants.  Fancy having a large red jar crammed full of currants on the floor of the larder and never wanting to eat one!  The thought of those currants produced in Mark’s mouth a craving for something sweet, and as quietly as possible he stole off downstairs to quench this craving somehow or other if it were only with a lump of sugar.  But when he reached the kitchen he found Dora in earnest talk with two women in bonnets, who were nodding away and clicking their tongues with pleasure.

“Now whatever do you want down here?” Dora demanded ungraciously.

“I wanted,” Mark paused.  He longed to say “some currants,” but he had failed before, and he substituted “a lump of sugar.”  The two women in bonnets looked at him and nodded their heads and clicked their tongues.

“Did you ever?” said one.

“Fancy!  A lump of sugar!  Goodness gracious!”

“What a sweet tooth!” commented the first.

The sugar happened to be close to Dora’s hand on the kitchen-table, and she gave him two lumps with the command to “sugar off back upstairs as fast as you like.”  The craving for sweetness was allayed; but when Mark had crunched up the two lumps on the dark kitchen-stairs, he was as lonely as he had been before he left the nursery.  He wished now that he had not eaten up the sugar so fast, that he had taken it back with him to the nursery and eked it out to wile away this endless afternoon.  The prospect of going back to the nursery depressed him; and he turned aside to linger in the dining-room whence there was a view of Lima Street, down which a dirty frayed man was wheeling a barrow and shouting for housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones.  Mark felt the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go off counting their pennies.  The voice of the rag-and-bone man, grew fainter and fainter round corners out of sight; Lima Street became as empty and uninteresting as the nursery.  Mark wished that a knife-grinder would come along and that he would stop under the dining-room window so that he could watch the sparks flying from the grindstone.  Or that a gipsy would sit down on the steps and begin to mend the seat of a chair.  Whenever he had seen those gipsy chair-menders at work, he had been out of doors and afraid to linger watching them in case he should be stolen and his face stained with walnut juice and all his clothes taken away from him.  But from the security of the dining-room of the Mission House he should enjoy watching them.  However, no gipsy came, nor anybody else except women with men’s caps pinned to their skimpy hair and little girls with wrinkled stockings carrying jugs to and from the public houses that stood at every corner.