"I am glad you think it's pretty," said her godmother. "I think it is very pretty; but the colours are not very bright, and children generally like very bright colours. The pattern is copied from a very old piece of tapestry." "What's tapestry?" said Hoodie. "Old-fashioned work that used to be made long ago," said Miss King. "It was more like great pictures than anything else, and such quantities of it were made that whole walls were covered with it. Once when I was a very little girl I slept in a room all covered with tapestry, and in the middle of the night----" She stopped suddenly. "_What?_" said Hoodie eagerly, peering up into her face. "What came in the middle of night?" "I didn't say anything came," said Cousin Magdalen, laughing. "I stopped because I thought I could make it into a little story and tell it to you afterwards. But we are forgetting all about your stories. Who is going to begin? Eldest first--you, Maudie, I suppose." Maudie looked rather melancholy. "I can't tell nice stories," she said. "I've been thinking such a time, and I can't think of anything except something very stupid." "Well, let us hear it, any way," said her cousin, "and then we can say if it is stupid or not." "It was a story I read," said Maudie, "or else some one told it me. I can't remember which it was. It was about a very poor little girl--she was dreadfully poor, just as poor as you could fancy." "No clothes--hadn't she no clothes?" asked Duke. "And nucken to eat?" added Hec. "Very little," said Maudie. "Of course she had some, or else she would have died. She hadn't any father or mother, only an old grandmother, who wasn't very kind to her. At least she was very old and deaf and all that, and perhaps that made her cross. And the little girl used to go messages for a shop--that was how she got a little money. It was a baker's shop near where they lived, and it was rather a grand shop--only they kept this little girl to go messages, not to the _grand_ people that came there, you know, but to the people that bought the bread when it wasn't so new--and currant cakes that were rather stale--like that, you know. And on Sunday mornings she had the most to do, because they used to send a great lot of bread very early to a room where a kind lady had breakfast for a great many poor people--for a treat because it was Sunday. They used to have lots of bread and butter and hot coffee--very nice. And Lizzie, that was the little girl's name, liked Sunday mornings and going with the bread to that place, because it all looked so cheerful and comfortable, and the smell of the hot coffee was so good." "Didn't they never give her none?" asked Duke.