“And I knows too!” Elspeth gurgled, “and I has threepence a’ready, I has.”

“Whisht!” said Tommy, in an agony of dread, “she hears you, and she’ll guess.  We ain’t speaking of nothing to give to you at Hogmanay,” he said to his mother with great cunning.  Then he winked at Elspeth and said, with his hand over his mouth, “I hinna twopence!” and Elspeth, about to cry in fright, “Have you spended it?” saw the joke and crowed instead, “Nor yet has I threepence!”

They smirked together, until Tommy saw a change come over Elspeth’s face, which made him run her outside the door.

“You was a-going to pray!” he said, severely.

“’Cos it was a lie, Tommy.  I does have threepence.”

“Well, you ain’t a-going to get praying about it.  She would hear yer.”

“I would do it low, Tommy.”

“She would see yer.”

“Oh, Tommy, let me.  God is angry with me.”

Tommy looked down the stair, and no one was in sight.  “I’ll let yer pray here,” he whispered, “and you can say I have twopence.  But be quick, and do it standing.”

Perhaps Mrs. Sandys had been thinking that when Hogmanay came her children might have no mother to bring presents to, for on their return to the room her eyes followed them woefully, and a shudder of apprehension shook her torn frame.  Tommy gave Elspeth a look that meant “I’m sure there’s something queer about her.”

There was also something queer about himself, which at this time had the strangest gallop.  It began one day with a series of morning calls from Shovel, who suddenly popped his head over the top of the door (he was standing on the handle), roared “Roastbeef!” in the manner of a railway porter announcing the name of a station, and then at once withdrew.

He returned presently to say that vain must be all attempts to wheedle his secret from him, and yet again to ask irritably why Tommy was not coming out to hear all about it.  Then did Tommy desert Elspeth, and on the stair Shovel showed him a yellow card with this printed on it:  “S.R.J.C.—­Supper Ticket;” and written beneath, in a lady’s hand:  “Admit Joseph Salt.”  The letters, Shovel explained, meant Society for the somethink of Juvenile Criminals, and the toffs what ran it got hold of you when you came out of quod.  Then if you was willing to repent they wrote down your name and the place what you lived at in a book, and one of them came to see yer and give yer a ticket for the blow-out night.  This was blow-out night, and that were Shovel’s ticket.  He had bought it from Hump Salt for fourpence.  What you get at the blow-out was roast-beef, plum-duff, and an orange; but when Hump saw the fourpence he could not wait.

A favor was asked of Tommy.  Shovel had been told by Hump that it was the custom of the toffs to sit beside you and question you about your crimes, and lacking the imagination that made Tommy such an ornament to the house, the chances were that he would flounder in his answers and be ejected.  Hump had pointed this out to him after pocketing the fourpence.  Would Tommy, therefore, make up things for him to say; reward, the orange.