he other son had never been
steady like his father. He had at last gone to London, and London had
swallowed him up. Betty was struck by the fact that she did not seem
to feel that the mother of ten might have expected some return for her
labours, at eighty-three.

Her unresentful acceptance of things was at once significant and
moving. Betty found her amazing. What she lived on it was not easy to
understand. She seemed rather like a cheerful old bird, getting up each
unprovided-for morning, and picking up her sustenance where she found
it.

"There's more in the sayin' 'the Lord pervides' than a good many
thinks," she said with a small chuckle, marked more by a genial and
comfortable sense of humour than by an air of meritoriously quoting the
vicar. "He DO."

She paid one and threepence a week in rent for her cottage, and this
was the most serious drain upon her resources. She apparently could live
without food or fire, but the rent must be paid. "An' I do get a bit
be'ind sometimes," she confessed apologetically, "an' then it's a
trouble to get straight."

Her cottage was one of a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women
who were her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after,
and "bits of 'elp" needed, sometimes there were "movings" from one
cottage to another, and "confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating
and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her
experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant. She was
engagingly frank.

"When they're new to it, an' a bit frightened, I just give 'em a cup
of 'ot tea, an' joke with 'em to cheer 'em up," she said. "I says to
Charles Jenkins' wife, as lives next door, 'come now, me girl, it's been
goin' on since Adam an' Eve, an' there's a good many of us left, isn't
there?' An' a fine boy it was, too, miss, an' 'er up an' about before
'er month."

She was paid in sixpences and spare shillings, and in cups of tea, or a
fresh-baked loaf, or screws of sugar, or even in a garment not yet worn
beyond repair. And she was free to run in and out, and grow a flower or
so in her garden, and talk with a neighbour over the low dividing hedge.

"They want me to go into the 'Ouse,'" reaching the dangerous subject at
last. "They say I'll be took care of an' looked after. But I don't want
to do it, miss. I want to keep my bit of a 'ome if I can, an' be free to
come an' go. I'm eighty-three, an' it won't be long. I 'ad a shilling a
week fr