They might have got over a third of the distance between the Bayswater Road and the Serpentine, when he was aware of a small thin voice addressing him. “Oh, please won’t you carry me a bit? I’m so tired,” said the voice. He turned in some trepidation to look for the speaker, and found her to be a sickly undergrown little girl, of ten or thereabouts, with large pleading gray eyes, very shabbily dressed, and a little lame. He had remarked her several times in the course of the day, not for any beauty or grace about her, for the poor child had none, but for her transparent confidence and trustfulness. After dinner, as they had been all sitting on the grass under the shade of a great elm to hear Grey read a story, and Tom had been sitting a little apart from the rest with his back against the trunk, she had come up and sat quietly down by him, leaning on his knee. Then he had seen her go up and take the hand of the lady who had entertained them, and walk along by her, talking without the least shyness. Soon afterwards she had squeezed into the swing by the side of the beautifully-dressed little daughter of the same lady, who, after looking for a minute at her shabby little sister with large round eyes, had jumped out and run off to her mother, evidently in a state of childish bewilderment as to whether it was not wicked for a child to wear such dirty old clothes. Tom had chuckled to himself as he saw Cinderella settling herself comfortably in the swing in the place of the ousted princess, and had taken a fancy to the child, speculating to himself as to how she could have been brought up, to be so utterly unconscious of differences of rank and dress. “She seems really to treat her fellow-creatures as if she had been studying the _Sartor Resartus_,” he thought. “She has cut down through all clothes-philosophy without knowing it. I wonder, if she had a chance, whether she would go and sit down in the Queen’s lap?” He did not at that time anticipate that she would put his own clothes-philosophy to so severe a test before the day was over. The child had been as merry and active as any of the rest during the earlier part of day; but now, as he looked down in answer to her reiterated plea, “Won’t you carry me a bit? I’m so tired!” he saw that she could scarcely drag one foot after another.