In scarlet serge dress and cap of scarlet stockinette, she danced to the tinsel melody. Unhampered by anything save the need for self-expression, she expressed the joyousness of a London morning as her feet took the paving-stones all dappled and flecked with shadows of the tall plane tree at the end of Hagworth Street. She was a dainty child, with silvery curls and almond eyes where laughter rippled in a blue so deep you would have vowed they were brown. The scarlet of her dress, through long use, had taken on the soft texture of a pastel.
Picture her, then, dancing alone in the quiet Islington street to this faded tune of Italy, as presently down the street that seemed stained with the warmth of alien suns shuffled an old man. He stopped to regard the dancing child over the crook of his ebony walking-stick.
"Aren't you Mrs. Raeburn's little girl?" he asked.
Jenny melted into shyness, lost nearly all her beauty, and became bunched and ordinary for a moment.
"Humph!" grunted the old man, and solemnly presented the organ grinder with a halfpenny.
Ruby O'Connor's voice rang out down the street.
"Come back directly, you limb!" she called. Jenny looked irresolute, but presently decided to obey.
That same evening the old man tapped at the kitchen door.
"Come in," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Is that you, Mr. Vergoe? Something gone wrong with your gas again? I do wish Charlie would remember to mend it."
"No, there's nothing the matter with the gas," explained the lodger. (For Mr. Vergoe was the lodger of Number Seventeen.) "Only I think that child of yours'll make a dancer some day."
"A dancer. I was watching her this morning. Wonderful notion of time. You ought to have her trained, so to speak."
"No, thank _you_. I don't want none of my children gadding round theaters."
"That's quite another kettle of fish. Thank you all the same, Mr. Vergoe, Jenny'll not go on to the stage."
"You're making a great mistake," he insisted. "And I suppose I know something about dancing, or ought to, as it were."
"I have my own ideas what's good for Jenny."
"But ain't she going to have a say in the matter, so to speak?"
"I'd rather not, thank you, and please don't start putting fancies in the child's head."
"Of course, I shouldn't. Of course not. That ain't to be thought of."