, nurse?" Mrs. Oliver would make some lame
excuse and pass quickly to another subject.

At last, being unable to bear the strain any longer, I burst out on the
woman with bitter reproaches, and then she broke down into tears and
explained everything. She was behind with her rent, the landlord was
threatening, and she dared not leave the house for a moment lest he
should lock her out altogether.

"I don't mind telling you, it's all along of Ted, ma'am. He's on strike
wages but he spends it at the 'Sun.' He has never been the man to
me--never once since I married him. I could work and keep the house
comfortable without him, but he wouldn't let me a-be, because he knows I
love, him dear. Yes, I do, I love him dear," she continued, breaking
into hysterical sobs, "and if he came home and killed me I could kiss
him with my last breath."

This touched me more than I can say. A sense of something tragic in the
position of the poor woman, who knew the character of the man she loved
as well as the weakness which compelled her to love him, made me
sympathise with her for the first time, and think (with a shuddering
memory of my own marriage) how many millions of women there must be in
the world who were in a worse position than myself.

On returning to my room that night I began to look about to see if I had
anything I could sell in order to help Mrs. Oliver, and so put an end to
the condition that kept my baby a prisoner in her house.

I had nothing, or next to nothing. Except the Reverend Mother's rosary
(worth no more than three or four shillings) I had only my mother's
miniature, which was framed in gold and set in pearls, but that was the
most precious of all my earthly possessions except my child.

Again and again when I looked at it in my darkest hours I had found new
strength and courage. It had been like a shrine to me--what the image of
the Virgin was in happier days--and thinking of all that my darling
mother had done and suffered and sacrificed for my sake when I was
myself a child, I felt that I could never part with her picture under
the pressure of any necessity whatever.

"Never," I thought, "never under any circumstances."

It must have been about a week after this that I went to Ilford on one
of those chill, clammy nights which seem peculiar to the East End of
London, where the atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog and thin
drizzling rain; penetrates to the bone and hangs on one's shoulders like
a shro