for the night, and looked surprised
and I thought chagrined, but took up the money and went away.

As they were going off one of them called me to the door, and in the
little space at the foot of the stairs he said, tipping his fingers
towards the cot:

"If that's your kiddie, miss, I recommend you to get it out o' this 'ere
place quick--see?"

I stayed an hour or two longer because I was troubled about baby's
cough; and before I left, being still uneasy, I did what I had never
done before--wrote my address at the Jew's house, so that I could be
sent for if I was ever wanted.

ONE HUNDREDTH CHAPTER

When I awoke next morning the last word of the broker's man seemed to be
ringing in my ears.

I knew it was true; I knew I ought to remove baby from the house of the
Olivers without another day's delay, but I was at a loss to know what to
do with her.

To bring her to my own room at the Jew's was obviously impossible, and
to advertise for a nurse for my child was to run the risk of falling
into the toils of somebody who might do worse than neglect her.

In my great perplexity I recalled the waitress at the restaurant whose
child had been moved to a Home in the country, and for some moments I
thought how much better it would be that baby should be "bonny and well"
instead of pale and thin as she was now. But when I reflected that if I
took her to a public institution I should see her only once a month, I
told myself that I could not and would not do so.

"I'll work my fingers to the bone first," I thought.

Yet life makes a fearful tug at a woman when it has once got hold of
her, and, strangely enough, it was in the Jew's house that I first came
to see that for the child's own sake I must part with her.

Somewhere about the time of my moving into the back room my employer
made a kind of bower of branches and evergreens over the lead-flat roof
of an outhouse in his back-yard--a Succah, as Miriam called it, built in
honour of the Feast of Tabernacles, as a symbol of the time when the
Israelites in the Wilderness dwelt in booths.

In this Succah the Jew's family ate all their meals during the seven or
eight days of the Jewish feast, and one morning, as I sat at work by my
open window, I heard Miriam after breakfast reading something from the
Books of Moses.

It was the beautiful story of Jacob parting with Benjamin in the days of
the famine, when there was corn in Egypt only--how the poor old father
in h