motherly woman with rosy cheeks was putting into the window a tray of
delicious newly baked hot buns, fresh from the oven--large, plump,
shiny buns, with currants in them.

It almost made Sara feel faint for a few seconds--the shock, and the
sight of the buns, and the delightful odors of warm bread floating up
through the baker's cellar window.

She knew she need not hesitate to use the little piece of money. It
had evidently been lying in the mud for some time, and its owner was
completely lost in the stream of passing people who crowded and jostled
each other all day long.

"But I'll go and ask the baker woman if she has lost anything," she
said to herself, rather faintly. So she crossed the pavement and put
her wet foot on the step. As she did so she saw something that made
her stop.

It was a little figure more forlorn even than herself--a little figure
which was not much more than a bundle of rags, from which small, bare,
red muddy feet peeped out, only because the rags with which their owner
was trying to cover them were not long enough. Above the rags appeared
a shock head of tangled hair, and a dirty face with big, hollow, hungry
eyes.

Sara knew they were hungry eyes the moment she saw them, and she felt a
sudden sympathy.

"This," she said to herself, with a little sigh, "is one of the
populace--and she is hungrier than I am."

The child--this "one of the populace"--stared up at Sara, and shuffled
herself aside a little, so as to give her room to pass. She was used
to being made to give room to everybody. She knew that if a policeman
chanced to see her he would tell her to "move on."

Sara clutched her little fourpenny piece and hesitated for a few
seconds. Then she spoke to her.

"Are you hungry?" she asked.

The child shuffled herself and her rags a little more.

"Ain't I jist?" she said in a hoarse voice. "Jist ain't I?"

"Haven't you had any dinner?" said Sara.

"No dinner," more hoarsely still and with more shuffling. "Nor yet no
bre'fast--nor yet no supper. No nothin'.

"Since when?" asked Sara.

"Dunno. Never got nothin' today--nowhere. I've axed an' axed."

Just to look at her made Sara more hungry and faint. But those queer
little thoughts were at work in her brain, and she was talking to
herself, though she was sick at heart.

"If I'm a princess," she was saying, "if I'm a princess--when they were
poor and driven from their thrones--they always shared--with the
po