"Oh! they will be _so_ glad," broke from her, and with a sob of joy she sprang away with her precious burden. "Well now, Mrs. Gray, you are a strange creature, trusting people like that, and absolutely laying out money too; I only wonder how you ever got along at all!" said a little, shrewish woman from a neighboring stand, who had been watching this scene from behind a heap of vegetables. "Poh! it's my way; and I can afford it," answered the huckster-woman, rubbing her plump palms together, and twinkling her eyelashes to disperse the moisture that had gathered under them. "I haven't sat in this market fourteen years for nothing. The child is a good child, I'll stake my life on it!" "I hope you may never see the pail again, that's all," was the terse reply. "Well, well, I may be wrong--maybe I am--we shall know soon. At any rate I can afford to lose half a dozen pails, that's one comfort." "Always chuckling over the money she has saved up," muttered the little woman, with a sneer; "for my part I don't believe that she is half as well off as she pretends to be." The conversation was here cut short by several customers, who crowded up to make their morning purchases. During the next half hour good Mrs. Gray was so fully occupied, that she had no opportunity for thought of her protégé; but just as she obtained a moment's breathing time, up came the little girl panting for breath; her cheeks glowing like June roses; and her eyes sparkling with delight. "They have had their breakfast; I told them all about it!" she said, in a panting whisper, drawing close up to the huckster-woman, and handing back the empty pail. "I wish you could have seen grandpa when I took off the cover, and let the hot coffee steam into the room. I only wish you could have seen him!" "And he liked it, did he?" "Liked it! Oh! if you had been there to see!" The child's eyes were brimful of tears, and yet they sparkled like diamonds. Mrs. Gray looked over her stall to see if there was anything else that could be added to the basket. That pretty, grateful look expanded her warm heart so pleasantly, that she felt quite like heaping everything at hand upon the little girl. But the basket was already quite heavy enough for that slender arm, and the addition of a single handful of fruit or tuft of flowers, would have destroyed the symmetry of its arrangement. So with a sigh, half of disappointment, half of that exquisite satisfaction that follows a kind act, she patted little Julia on the head, lifted the basket from the stool, and kindly bade her begone to her day's work. The child departed with a light tread and a lighter heart, smiling upon every one she met, and looking back, as if she longed to point out her benefactress to the whole world. Mrs. Gray followed her with moist and sunny eyes; then shaking the empty pail at her cynical neighbor, in the good-humored triumph of her benevolence, she carried it back to the coffee-stand whence it had been borrowed.