"If you please, ma'am, I am Joy. I go to school with Bertha, and she has been home to tea with me and Uncle Bobo, and I have brought her back."
"She does not want bringing," was the sharp reply; "she can bring herself, I suppose. Go round to the back door, will you?"
"I think I had better _not_," Joy said with emphasis, "because you do not wish me to come into your house."
Mrs. Skinner had been standing motionless at the door while Joy was speaking, and there was a strange expression on her sharp thin features.
"I live with Uncle Bobo, in the row, opposite Miss Pinckney and Mrs. Harrison. Miss Pinckney keeps the milliner's shop, where the widows' caps hang up."
"_I_ know," was the reply; "I never bought any article there, and I never mean to. Well, you may run round with Bertha for a few minutes."
"Thank you," Joy said. "I hope you'll let Bet come to tea again; and if you'd like to come too, I am sure Uncle Bobo wouldn't mind."
"I don't spend _my_ time gadding about taking tea with folks. I leave that to drones, who've got nothing better to do. Did you say, child, you lived with Boyd, at the instrument shop?"
Mrs. Skinner turned away, and then the door was shut with a sharp bang, and the two girls were left outside.
"I don't think I'll come in, Bet," little Miss Joy said; "for your grandmother does not like me--she looks so cross."
"She always looks like that," Bertha said; and then she added, "Every one but you is cross to me; you are always kind. Oh, I do love you!"
Then Bet's cheeks, after making this declaration, were suffused with blushes, which made her poor sallow face a dark purplish-red.
The two girls went in at the back door, and along a narrow stone passage.
The door on the right was open, and Bet said, in a low whisper--
"There's Uncle Joe's room. There's where he sits at night, and I hear people coming in, 'cause my window is one in the lean-to."
Uncle Joe's proceedings had not much interest for Joy, and she just looked round the room standing on the threshold, and said--
"What a big table for such a wee little room, covered with green cloth, and what funny little boxes! They are like the big hour-glass in Uncle Bobo's glass case. It's not a pretty room at all," she said decidedly. "Come away, Bet."