There were the conventional touches about the London street-picture, as
Esther Ansell sped through the freezing mist of the December evening,
with a pitcher in her hand, looking in her oriental coloring like a
miniature of Rebecca going to the well. A female street-singer, with a
trail of infants of dubious maternity, troubled the air with a piercing
melody; a pair of slatterns with arms a-kimbo reviled each other's
relatives; a drunkard lurched along, babbling amiably; an organ-grinder,
blue-nosed as his monkey, set some ragged children jigging under the
watery rays of a street-lamp. Esther drew her little plaid shawl tightly
around her, and ran on without heeding these familiar details, her
chilled feet absorbing the damp of the murky pavement through the worn
soles of her cumbrous boots. They were masculine boots, kicked off by
some intoxicated tramp and picked up by Esther's father. Moses Ansell
had a habit of lighting on windfalls, due, perhaps, to his meek manner
of walking with bent head, as though literally bowed beneath the yoke of
the Captivity. Providence rewarded him for his humility by occasional
treasure-trove. Esther had received a pair of new boots from her school
a week before, and the substitution, of the tramp's foot-gear for her
own resulted in a net profit of half-a-crown, and kept Esther's little
brothers and sisters in bread for a week. At school, under her teacher's
eye, Esther was very unobtrusive about the feet for the next fortnight,
but as the fear of being found out died away, even her rather morbid
conscience condoned the deception in view of the stomachic gain.

They gave away bread and milk at the school, too, but Esther and her
brothers and sisters never took either, for fear of being thought in
want of them. The superiority of a class-mate is hard to bear, and a
high-spirited child will not easily acknowledge starvation in presence
of a roomful of purse-proud urchins, some of them able to spend a
farthing a day on pure luxuries. Moses Ansell would have been grieved