Dicky grew slighter and lanker, dark about the eyes, and weaker. He was growing longitudinally, and that made his lateral¹ wasting the quicker and the more apparent. A furtive² frighted look hung ever in his face, a fugitive³ air about his whole person. His mother's long face was longer than ever, and blacker under the eyes than Dicky's own, and her weak open mouth hung at the corners as that of a woman faint with weeping. Little Em's knees and elbows were knobs in the midst of limbs of unnatural⁴ length. Rarely could a meal be seen ahead; and when it came, it made Dicky doubtful whether or not hunger were really caused by eating. But his chief distress⁵ was to see that little Em cried not like a child, but silently, as she strove to thread needles or to smear⁶ matchbox labels. And when good fortune brought match-boxes, there was an undue⁷ loss on the twopence farthing in the matter of paste. The stuff was a foul⁸ mess, sour and faint, and it was kept in a broken tea-cup, near which Dicky had detected his sister sucking her fingers; for in truth little Em stole the paste.  
On and off, by one way and another, Mrs Perrott made enough to keep the rent paid with indifferent regularity⁹, and sometimes there was a copper¹⁰ or so left over. She did fairly well, too, at the churches and prayer-meetings; people saw her condition, and now and again would give her something beyond the common dole¹¹; so that she learned the trick of looking more miserable¹² than usual at such places.
 
The roof provided, Dicky felt that his was the task to find food. Alone, he might have rubbed along clear of starvation, but there were his mother and his sister. Lack of victuals¹³ shook his nerve and made him timid. Moreover, his terror grew greater than ever at the prospect¹⁴ of being caught in a theft. He lay awake at night and sweated to think of it. Who would bring in things from the outer world for mother and Em then? And the danger was worse than ever. He had felt the police-court birch, and it was bad, very bad. But he would take it every day and take it almost without a tear, rather than the chance of a reformatory. Magistrates¹⁵ were unwilling

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