Her evident gratitude reproached Jean, and she forgot all about the dangers of indiscriminate charity. She took the other two by the hand and pulled them away to the door.
'We'll come back again directly, Mrs. Hearne,' she called out. Then the triumvirate broke into a run, and vanished along the road before the eyes of the bewildered woman.
'What are we going to do?' asked Angela, panting, when they once more climbed the gate at the bottom of the nine-acre field.
'We're going straight to the larder, straight as we can go; and then, we're just going to bag all the food we can carry,' answered Jean, in an odd, determined sort of tone. 'Did you see the look on that woman's face when you gave her the money, Babe? I believe--I believe they've all had nothing to eat for _weeks_! It's--it's horrible to think of!'
There was a sob in her voice, and the other two were silent from sympathy and a kind of awkwardness. They had never heard Jean talk like this before, and it finished the work begun by the Canon's address. There was not the thought of a scruple in either of their minds when they arrived at the back of the house, and Jean bade them climb up by the water-butt and get into the larder through the open window.
'There's sure to be a hook you can undo so as to move the wire netting aside,' she told them. 'If we went round to the door, some one might make a fuss; and there's no time for fusses.'
'Jean knows everything,' murmured Angela, as she found the hook and squeezed successfully through the window.
'What shall we take?' whispered Babs, slipping after her into the dimly lighted larder. 'I think they'd like jam tart and plum-pudding, don't you?'
She shifted the two delicacies dearest to her heart on to one dish, and handed it up to Jean, who stood poised uncertainly on the edge of the water-butt.
'The jelly and the cranberry pie look rather nice,' said Angela, her own mouth watering for them, as she passed them out to Jean.
'Can't you find something substantial?' urged Jean, when she had deposited the second load on the ground beside the water-butt.
The two children in the larder looked round at the well-stocked shelves. There was cold beef, to be sure, and a large tureen of mutton broth; but these did not strike them as being at all the sort of present that any one would like to have.