Page:Her Benny - Silas K Hocking (Warne, 1890).djvu/156

132 He missed her everywhere, and was continually fancying he saw her running to meet him as he drew near the church where they had regularly met for so long a time; and sometimes he would turn round with a sudden starts and with the word "Nelly" on his lips, as he fancied he heard the pattering of her little feet behind him.

He grew despondent, too. While Nelly lived there was some one to work for, some one to bear rebuffs and insults for; but now what did it matter whether he sold his matches or not? He could go hungry; he did not mind. In fact, he did not seem to care what became of him. There seemed to him nothing to fight the world for—nothing.

But for Joe he would have moped his life away in some dark comer where no one could see him. But Joe taught him to believe that his little sister was not lost, only gone before, and that perhaps she looked down upon him from heaven, and that it might grieve her to see him fretting so.

So he tried to sell his matches or earn a penny in some other way in a listless, hopeless manner. But it was very hard work. And when evening came he would drag himself wearily to his little corner under granny's stairs, and generally sob himself to sleep. He missed his little companion in the evenings almost more than at any time, and wished that he had died with her. Sometimes he went out to the cemetery to see her grave; and no one knew what the little fellow suffered