is great love could not bring himself to give up his beloved son,
although death threatened him; how Judah pleaded with Jacob to send the
boy with him into the far country lest they should all die, "both we and
thou and also our little ones;" and how at last Jacob said, "If it must
be so, do this," but "if I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved."

It would be hard to say how deeply this story moved me while I listened
from my room above. And now that I thought of it again, I saw that I was
only sacrificing my child to my selfish love of her, and therefore the
duty of a true mother was to put her into a Home.

It would not be for long. The work I was doing was not the only kind I
was capable of. After I had liberated myself from the daily extortions
of the Olivers I should be free to look about for more congenial and
profitable employment; and then by and by baby and I might live together
in that sweet cottage in the country (I always pictured it as a kind of
Sunny Lodge, with roses looking in at the window of "Mary O'Neill's
little room") which still shone through my dreams.

I spent some sleepless nights in reconciling myself to all this, and
perhaps wept a little, too, at the thought that after years of
separation I might be a stranger to my own darling. But at length I put
my faith in "the call of the blood" to tell her she was mine, and then
nothing remained except to select the institution to which my only love
and treasure was to be assigned.

Accident helped me in this as in other things. One day on my westward
journey a woman who sat beside me in the tram, and was constantly wiping
her eyes (though I could see a sort of sunshine through her tears),
could not help telling me, out of the overflowing of her poor heart,
what had just been happening to her.

She was a widow, and had been leaving her little girl, three years old,
at an orphanage, and though it had been hard to part with her, and the
little darling had looked so pitiful when she came away, it would be the
best for both of them in the long run.

I asked which orphanage it was, and she mentioned the name of it,
telling me something about the founder--a good doctor who had been a
father to the fatherless of thousands of poor women like herself.

That brought me to a quick decision, and the very next morning, putting
on my hat and coat, I set off for the Home, which I knew where to find,
having walked round it on my way back from the West End an