“Hold up, can’t ye, gal!” exclaimed Mother Winch, as the child tripped, and nearly fell.  “Or, if you’re so tired as all that, set down on that door-stone, and wait for me a minute.”  Pushing her down upon the step as she spoke, Mother Winch hurried away so fast, that, before ’Toinette’s tired little brain could fairly understand what was said, she found herself alone, with no creature in sight all up and down the narrow street, except a cross-looking dog walking slowly along the pavement toward her.  For one moment, she sat wondering what she had better do; and then, as the cross-looking dog fixed his eyes upon her with a sullen growl, she started to her feet, and ran as fast as she could in the direction taken by Mother Winch.  Just at the corner of the alley, something glittering upon the sidewalk attracted her attention; and, stooping to pick it up, she uttered a little cry of surprise and pleasure.  It was her own coral bracelet, which had traveled round in Mother Winch’s pocket until it came to a hole in the bottom, and quietly slipping out, and down her skirts to the pavement, lay waiting for its little mistress to pick it up.

’Toinette kissed it again and again, not because it was a bracelet but because her father had given it to her; and it seemed somehow to take her back a little way toward him and home.  It must have been this she meant, in saying as she did,—­

“I guess you have come after me, pretty bracelet, hasn’t you? and we’ll go home together.”

And so, hugging the toy as close to her heart as she would have liked herself to be hugged to her mother’s heart, ’Toinette wandered on and on through the dark and lonely streets, her little face growing paler and paler, her little feet more and more weary, her heart swelling fuller and fuller with fright and desolation; until at last, stopping suddenly, she looked up at the sky, all alive now with the crowding stars, and with a great sob whispered,—­

“Pretty stars, please tell God I’m lost.  I think he doesn’t know about it, or he’d send me home.”

And then, as the wild sob brought another and another, ’Toinette sank down in the doorway of a deserted house, and, covering her face with her hands, cried as she had never cried in all her little life.

CHAPTER VII.

Teddy’s little sister.

“There, honey!” said Mrs. Ginniss, giving the last rub to the shirt-bosom she was polishing, and setting her flat-iron back on the stove with a smack,—­“there, honey; and I couldn’t have done better by that buzzum if ye’d been the Prisidint.”

Mrs. Ginniss was alone, so that one might at first have been a little puzzled to know whom she addressed as “honey;” but as she continued to talk while unfolding another shirt, and laying it upon her ironing-board, it became evident that she was addressing the absent owner of the garments.