pretty dress, but would not allow herself to cry, as she longed to
do.

"If I'd got my gingham dress on, it wouldn't do so much harm,"
thought she, her mind returning to the story she had that afternoon
heard; and then all at once an anxious longing for home and mother
seized the little heart, and sent the tiny feet flying up the narrow
street as fast as they could move. But, at the corner, 'Toinette,
who never had seen the street before, took the wrong turn; and,
although she ran as fast as she could, every step now led her
farther from home, and deeper into the squalid by-streets and
alleys, among which she was lost.






CHAPTER VI.

MOTHER WINCH.





IN a narrow court, hardly lighted by the one gas-light flaring at
its entrance, 'Toinette stopped, and, looking dismally about her,
began at last to cry. At the sound, a crooked old woman, with a
great bag on her back, who had been resting upon the step of a door