“I allers knowed as there were sich a beauty place, but I didn’t jest know its name.”

“How could yer know?” Tommy asked jealously.

“I ain’t sure,” said Shovel, “p’raps I dreamed on it.”

“That’s it,” Tommy cried.  “I tell yer, everybody dreams on it!” and Tommy was right; everybody dreams of it, though not all call it Thrums.

On the whole, then, the coming of the kid, who turned out to be called Elspeth, did not ostracize Tommy, but he wished that he had let the other girl in, for he never doubted that her admittance would have kept this one out.  He told neither his mother nor his friend of the other girl, fearing that his mother would be angry with him when she learned what she had missed, and that Shovel would crow over his blundering, but occasionally he took a side glance at the victorious infant, and a poorer affair, he thought, he had never set eyes on.  Sometimes it was she who looked at him, and then her chuckle of triumph was hard to bear.  As long as his mother was there, however, he endured in silence, but the first day she went out in a vain search for work (it is about as difficult to get washing as to get into the Cabinet), he gave the infant a piece of his mind, poking up her head with a stick so that she was bound to listen.

“You thinks as it was clever on you, does yer?  Oh, if I had been on the stair!

“You needn’t not try to get round me.  I likes the other one five times better; yes, three times better.

“Thievey, thievey, thief, that’s her place you is lying in.  What?

“If you puts out your tongue at me again—!  What do yer say?

“She was twice bigger than you.  You ain’t got no hair, nor yet no teeth.  You’re the littlest I ever seed.  Eh?  Don’t not speak then, sulks!”

Prudence had kept him away from the other girl, but he was feeling a great want:  someone to applaud him.  When we grow older we call it sympathy.  How Reddy (as he called her because she had beautiful red-brown hair) had appreciated him!  She had a way he liked of opening her eyes very wide when she looked at him.  Oh, what a difference from that thing in the back of the bed!

Not the mere selfish desire to see her again, however, would take him in quest of Reddy.  He was one of those superior characters, was Tommy, who got his pleasure in giving it, and therefore gave it.  Now, Reddy was a worthy girl.  In suspecting her of overreaching him he had maligned her:  she had taken what he offered, and been thankful.  It was fitting that he should give her a treat:  let her see him again.