Yet at the very time when Bertram was picturing the child happy in the midst of wild flowers, scented hay, and the glories of summertide in the country, and Madge was busy with her preparations for receiving her later on when the woods should be scarlet and the nuts hanging ripe from the bough, little Allumette was sitting, languid and suffering, pent up in a close and reeking attic with three sick children, all prostrated by a sort of low fever which had broken out in the locality, and which was carrying off little victims by the dozen. It was not a regularly infectious fever, and it was practically impossible to isolate or remove the sick. Many children recovered after a few days’ prostration, and seemed little the worse, but some died, and others lay helpless and weak for a considerable time, and though the overworked doctor did his best to cope with it, he was able to do but little except offer a few hints as to feeding and treatment, which too often could not be carried out. The children in Allumette’s home had sickened rather early. One little boy had died, whilst the rest were struggling back to convalescence, their recovery greatly retarded by the heat of the attic, and the bad air they constantly breathed. Allumette had gone to her match-selling as usual for some considerable time. It was a relief to get out of the unwholesome place, and even the hot streets seemed almost fresh by comparison. Yet never had the life of the streets seemed so hard or so uncongenial to little Allumette as they did upon her return from the gardener’s cottage at Hampstead. She shrank from the rough words and rough ways of the boys and girls plying a like calling with herself as she had never shrunk from it before. They jeered at her, too, in her neater clothes, and made game of her when she spoke of what she had been doing in her absence. Her gentleman was not in London, and the days seemed so long and dreary. She could not eat the coarse food with the old relish, and the uncleanly odours of the court and of the attics where she lived, which before she had taken as a matter of course, now turned her sick. She still snatched a few happy minutes when she could go and pay a visit to the old cobbler and his wife. Here she was doubly happy in being away from all that was foul and disagreeable, and in being able to talk freely to the old people of all the joys of those wonderful weeks in the studio.