kid arter all!" screamed Shovel, furiously. Disappointment
gave him eloquence, and Tommy cowered under his sneers, not
understanding them, but they seemed to amount to this, that in
having a baby he had disgraced the house.

"But I think," he said, with diffidence, "I think I were once one."

Then all Shovel could say was that he had better keep it dark on that
stair.

Tommy squeezed his fist into one eye, and the tears came out at the
other. A good-natured impulse was about to make Shovel say that though
kids are undoubtedly humiliations, mothers and boys get used to them in
time, and go on as brazenly as before, but it was checked by Tommy's
unfortunate question, "Shovel, when will it come?"

Shovel, speaking from local experience, replied truthfully that they
usually came very soon after the doctor, and at times before him.

"It ain't come before him," Tommy said, confidently.

"How do yer know?"

"'Cos it weren't there at dinner-time, and I been here since
dinner-time."

The words meant that Tommy thought it could only enter by way of the
stair, and Shovel quivered with delight. "H'st!" he cried, dramatically,
and to his joy Tommy looked anxiously down the stair, instead of up it.

"Did you hear it?" Tommy whispered.

Before he could control himself Shovel blurted out: "Do you think as
they come on their feet?"

"How then?" demanded Tommy; but Shovel had exhausted his knowledge of
the subject. Tommy, who had begun to descend to hold the door, turned
and climbed upwards, and his tears were now but the drop left in a cup
too hurriedly dried. Where was he off to? Shovel called after him; and
he answered, in a determined whisper: "To shove of it out if it tries to
come in at the winder."

This was enough for the more knowing urchin, now so full of good things
that with another added he must spill, and away he ran for an audience,
which could also help him to bait Tommy, that being a game most sportive
when there are several to fling at once. At the door he knocked over,
and was done with, a laughing little girl who had strayed from a more
fashionable street. She rose solemnly, and kissing her muff, to reassure
it if it had got a fright, toddled in at the first open door to be out
of the way of unmannerly boys.

Tommy, climbing courageously, heard the door slam, and looking down he
saw--a strange child. He climbed no higher. It had come.

After a long time he was one flight of stairs nearer it. It was ma