eating my request (very
timidly this time and with such a humble, humble heart) that I might be
allowed to recover my child as soon as I found myself able to provide
for her, than she stopped me and said:

"My dear young person, we could have half the orphan children in London
on your terms. Before we accept such a child as yours we expect the
parent to give us a legal undertaking that she relinquishes all rights
in it until it is sixteen years of age."

"Sixteen? Isn't that rather severe on a mother?" I said.

"Justly severe," said the matron. "Such women should be made to maintain
their children, and thus realise that the way of transgressors is hard."

How I got back to London, whether by rail or tram or on foot, or what
happened on the way (except that darkness was settling down on me,
within and without), I do not know. I only know that very late that
night, as late as eleven o'clock, I was turning out of Park Lane into
Piccadilly, where the poor "public women" with their painted faces,
dangling their little hand-bags from their wrists, were promenading in
front of the gentlemen's clubs and smiling up at the windows.

These were the scenes which had formerly appalled me; but now I was
suddenly surprised by a different feeling, and found myself thinking
that among the women who sinned against their womanhood there might be
some who sold themselves for bread to keep those they loved and who
loved them.

This thought was passing through my mind when I heard a hollow ringing
laugh from a woman who was standing at the foot of a flight of steps
talking to a group of three gentlemen whose white shirt fronts beneath
their overcoats showed that they were in evening dress.

Her laughter was not natural. It had no joy in it, yet she laughed and
laughed, and feeling as if I _knew_ (because life had that day trampled
on me also), I said to myself:

"That woman's heart is dead."

This caused me to glance at her as I passed, when, catching a side
glimpse of her face, I was startled by a memory I could not fix.

"Where and when have I seen that woman's face before?" I thought.

It seemed impossible that I could have seen it anywhere. But the woman's
resemblance to somebody I had known, coupled with her joyless laughter,
compelled me to stop at the next corner and look back.

By this time the gentlemen, who had been treating her lightly (O God,
how men treat such women!), had left her and, coming arm-in-arm in my
dire