Audrey: Children of Light

"NOW, Audrey!"

"Yes, Aunt Cordelia?"

"That's the third clean pinafore that you've had this week," said Aunt Cordelia severely, "and it's only Thursday. Now, Audrey!"

And when Aunt Cordelia said, "Now, Audrey!" The little girl who was addressed knew that something was seriously amiss.

She was a pretty little girl, with fair hair and brown eyes, and the warm summer sun had tanned her as brown as the nuts in the window of Aunt Cordelia's shop. She stood in the corner of the little back parlour looking ruefully at her pinafore, which was almost as black as if she had sent it up the chimney for five minutes' change of air.

"Now, Audrey!" repeated Aunt Cordelia more solemnly than before.

The poor child could not bear up against this last terrible appeal, and bursting into tears, she sobbed—

"I wish there weren't such things as pinafores; I do wish there weren't!"

"No such things as pinafores?" said Aunt Cordelia. "Why, what would become of careless little girls' frocks, if there were no nice pinafores to cover them, I should like to know?"

"I hate pinafores," sobbed the child, taking no notice of her aunt's words; "I wish the Queen would say nobody was ever to wear them again!"

"For shame, Audrey," said Aunt Cordelia, "you should never say you hate anything; it's very wicked indeed! Least of all you should never hate pinafores, that keep you nice and clean and tidy."

"But that's just what they don't do," said Audrey. "They will get black and grimy. I can't ever have a bit of fun because of them."

Then, as she dried her tears, a bright thought struck her, and she said, "Couldn't I have a black pinafore, Aunt Cordelia, and then it wouldn't show the dirt, would it now?"

"Well," said her aunt, laughing in spite of herself, "it will come to that one of these days, I expect. Now go and get a clean pinafore at once; and remember that's four this week," she called after her, as the little girl ran upstairs.

It was a quaint old house in which Audrey and her aunt, Miss Palmer, lived. Miss Palmer loved to boast about it to the customers who came to the shop. It was three hundred years old, she told them, and the wainscot was real oak, and the bannisters on the stairs were carved, and there were curious old cupboards with black oak doors, and there was a chimney so wide that none of the sweep's brushes were large enough to sweep it.

But though Miss Palmer was very proud of her old house, which had been in the family for so many years that the family had quite lost count of their number, yet it caused her a great deal of worry and anxiety. There never was such a place for dust as that old house; it collected in every corner, it lay upon the window-sills, and it settled upon the bright dish-covers and pewter jugs in the kitchen.

With this dust Miss Palmer was always waging war. From morning till night—week in and week out—she fought perseveringly with the ever-gathering dust, and tried to make her house as prim and as neat as her tidy soul longed to see it. But just as Audrey's pinafores would get black, so the old house would get dusty, and the two together brought many a line of care into Miss Palmer's forehead.

Audrey had lived with her aunt since she was a fortnight old. Her father was a baker in a town two hundred miles away. She had never seen him, and he had never seen her since her aunt had carried her off, a tiny, sickly baby, nearly eight years ago. Audrey's mother had died soon after she was born, and her father had sent a piteous letter to his sister Cordelia, telling her he did not know what would become of him and of his nine motherless children, now Alice was gone.