of faded red
and green grandeur. Then she came and moaned by the stove. She rocked
to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the
two children about their "poor mother" and "yer fader, damn 'is soul."

The little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan
on it. She tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.

Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds. He cast furtive glances at his
mother. His practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a
muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat. He
sat breathless.

Maggie broke a plate.

The mother started to her feet as if propelled.

"Good Gawd," she howled. Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden
hatred. The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple. The
little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.

He floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs. He
stumbled, panic-stricken, to the next floor. An old woman opened a
door. A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin's quivering face.

"Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin' yer
mudder, or yer mudder beatin' yer fader?"

Chapter III

Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. Above the muffled
roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the
thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound
of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels
over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the
mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.

The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at
will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small music-box
capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in
assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position upon the
stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and
crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol. She received daily a
small sum in pennies. It was contributed, for the most part, by
persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity.

Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled
woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her
cloak. When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost
kicked the stomach out of a huge p