"I want you to run down to the hospital with this letter and be sure to tell the porter it is to be given to Mrs. Earlforward to-night. She's in there. And here's sixpence for you, and I'll lend you my umbrella and I'll get it again from your mammy to-morrow morning; but you must just walk to the Steps with me first because I don't want to get wet."
"Right-o, Elsie!" he agreed in his rough, breaking voice, and louder: "So long, Nell!"
"Put it in your pocket now," Elsie said, handing him the letter. "No; don't take the keys." She was still carrying Mr. Earlforward's bunch of keys.
The boy insisted on taking the umbrella, which gave him almost as much happiness as the sixpence. Never before had he had the opportunity to show off with an umbrella. He wished that he could get rid of the sack, which did not at all match the umbrella's glory.
"Here, hold on!" He stopped her and threw the sack over the railings into his mother's area. They walked together towards the Steps.
"Your Joe's been asking for you to-night," he said suddenly.
"My Joe!" She stood still, then leaned against the railings.
"Here! Come _on_!" he adjured her, nervously sniggering in a cheeky way to hide the emotion in him caused by hers.
"Told him where you was living, I suppose."
"Now you hurry with that letter, Jerry," she said at the shop-door. Mrs. Perkins's boy sailed round the corner into King's Cross Road with the umbrella on high.
Elsie had the feeling that she had not herself spoken to Jerry at all, but that she had heard someone else speaking to him with her voice. And she was quite giddy between the influences of fear and of happiness. Her hands and feet were very cold. All kinds of memories and hopes which she had murdered in cold blood and buried deep came rushing and thronging out of their graves, intensely alive, and overwhelmed her mind. The anarchy within her was such that she had to think painfully before she could even command her fingers to open the shop-door.
Entering from the street, you had to cross the full length of the shop to the wall between it and the office in order to turn on the electric light. As Elsie passed gropingly between the bays of shelves she thought that she heard a sound of movement, and then the question struck and shook her: "Was the door latched or unlatched when I opened it?" She could not be sure, so uncertain and clumsy had been her hands. She dared not, for a moment, light the shop lest she should see something sinister or something that she wanted too much to see.