Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/17

Premonitions rusty, dinted-in tin pail. In the bottom of this tin pail were two or three miserable little shreds of coal and half a dozen wet chips. He knew well enough that he dare not go home with them.

On one foot he wore a toeless button shoe, on the other a man's rubber over-shoe, tied at the top with string. From a hole in this rubber shoe a small bare toe curled up impertinently. His ragged and mud-stained plaid skirt did not come quite to his knees, and his legs were bare, and chafed, and scratched. On the skirt, which he wore with supreme unconcern, remained three quite unnecessary buttons showing it must once have belonged to another—probably some departed or grown-up sister. But none of all these things seemed to trouble the Child.

He stood in the rain at the roadside, tranquilly watching with wide, childish eyes, the more agile fuel-hunters as they dodged in and out, swallow-like, among the passing lorries and electric cars, in quest of their alluring fragments of coal.

Occasionally his baby eyes stole furtively 5