the back kitchen sink,
where it nestled among potato peelings like a flower among foliage, and
carefully cut half a dozen of the smaller flowers. Then he limped up to
New Cross Station, and stood outside, leaning on his crutch, and holding
out the flowers to the people who came crowding out of the station after
the arrival of each train--thick, black crowds of tired people, in too
great a hurry to get home to their teas to care much about him or his
flowers. Everybody glanced at them, for they were wonderful flowers, as
white as water-lilies, only flat--the real sunflower shape--and their
centres were of the purest yellow gold color.

"Pretty, ain't they?" one black-coated person would say to another. And
the other would reply--

"No. Yes. I dunno! Hurry up, can't you?"

It was no good. Dickie was tired, and the flowers were beginning to
droop. He turned to go home, when a sudden thought brought the blood to
his face. He turned again quickly and went straight to the pawnbroker's.
You may be quite sure he had learned the address on the card by heart.

He went boldly into the shop, which had three handsome gold balls
hanging out above its door, and in its window all sorts of pretty
things--rings, and chains, and brooches, and watches, and china, and
silk handkerchiefs, and concertinas.

"Well, young man," said the stout gentleman behind the counter, "what
can we do for you?"

"I want to pawn my moonflowers," said Dickie.

The stout gentleman roared with laughter, and slapped a stout leg with a
stout hand.

"Well, that's a good 'un!" he said, "as good a one as ever I heard. Why,
you little duffer, they'd be dead long before you came back to redeem
them, that's certain."

"You'd have them while they were alive, you know," said Dickie gently.

"What are they? Don't seem up to much. Though I don't know that I ever
saw a flower just like them, come to think of it," said the pawnbroker,
who lived in a neat villa at Brockley and went in for gardening in a
gentlemanly, you-needn't-suppose-I-can't-afford-a-real-gardener-if-I-like
sort of way.

"They're moonflowers," said Dickie, "and I want to pawn them and then
get something else out with the money."

"Got the ticket?" said the gentleman, cleverly seeing that he meant "get
out of pawn."

"Yes," said Dickie; "and it's my own Tinkler that my daddy gave me
before he died, and my aunt Missa propagated it when I was in hospital."

The man looked carefully at the card