coming across from the inn told me that a gentleman in the Cherry room
would have us come to him. I gave him a civil answer and carried this
message to my friends. Moll, who had staunched her tears and was smiling
piteously, though her sobs, like those of a child, still shook her thin
frame, and her father both looked at me in blank doubt as fearing some
trap for our further discomfiture.

"Nay," says Jack, stoutly. "Fate can serve us no worse within doors than
without, so let us in and face this gentleman, whoever he is."

So in we go, and all sodden and bedrabbled as we were, went to follow
the drawer upstairs, when the landlady cried out she would not have us
go into her Cherry room in that pickle, to soil her best furniture and
disgrace her house, and bade the fellow carry us into the kitchen to
take off our cloaks and change our boots for slip-shoes, adding that if
we had any respect for ourselves, we should trim our hair and wash the
grime off our faces. So we enter the kitchen, nothing loath, where a
couple of pullets browning on the spit, kettles bubbling on the fire,
and a pasty drawing from the oven, filled the air with delicious odours
that nearly drove us mad for envy; and to think that these good things
were to tempt the appetite of some one who never hungered, while we,
famishing for want, had not even a crust to appease our cravings! But it
was some comfort to plunge our blue, numbed fingers into a tub of hot
water and feel the life blood creeping back into our hearts. The paint
we had put on our cheeks the night before was streaked all over our
faces by the snow, so that we did look the veriest scarecrows
imaginable; but after washing our heads well and stroking our hair into
order with a comb Mistress Cook lent us, we looked not so bad. And thus
changed, and with dry shoes to our feet, we at length went upstairs, all
full of wondering expectation, and were led into the Cherry room, which