Lotte was rapid with her needle, and was full of self-sacrifice, that she might be self-dependent. She possessed great powers of endurance, and, to preserve her independence, she taxed those powers to the utmost. No one but herself knew what privations she had undergone. No one but herself could tell of the hardships she had faced, struggled with, without a despairing sigh, and had surmounted--until the cruel circumstances succeeding the fire had ruthlessly dragged from her all hope.
Now her trials and her miseries seemed to have vanished. She had not to work so hard, for she was far better paid, and if her old habit of early rising still adhered to her, she laid her pretty, happy face upon her soft pillow at least an hour before midnight.
Her furniture was all her own, too, now; to the kind liberality of Flora Wilton she was indebted for that, and she had, at least, a sovereign by her for an emergency. She had begun to deposit in a Savings Bank already. She had a plan daintily conceived, which involved a fair amount of poetical justice. She had indomitable perseverance, and, if events unforeseen and uncontrollable did not occur, she fully resolved to carry it out. Her room--her one room, for she had only one--was a little picture, so clean, so tidy, so prettily arranged it was. There was her table with its two flaps, so that if she felt lonely and somewhat disposed to turn with liberal hand her economy aside it would accommodate a visitor--ay, actually company.
Then, in addition to her neat set of chairs, there was a sofa, which, by a marvel of mechanical ingenuity was converted at night into a pretty little bedstead. There was upon the floor a neat-patterned carpet. Upon the flowered walls a picture or two, not of much value, but they added to the liveliness of the room.
She had, too, a charming little canary, such a dear tiltle “dick,” which chirruped and sang to her all the long day, looking at her every now and then, and calling “sweet” to her with as knowing an expression in his little bright eye, as if he were that young smart though anky grocer himself round the corner, who never served her with sugar but he gazed upon her as if, like the genuine “barley,” he was a “sweetness long drawn out.”