threatened, I could
bear her mistake no longer, but told her of my real condition--that I
was no longer a lady, that I had run away from my husband, that I had a
child, and was living as a poor seamstress in the East End of London.

Angela listened to my story in astonishment; and when I had come to an
end she was holding my hand and looking into my eyes with just that look
which she had when she put me to bed for the first time at school, and,
making her voice very low, told me to be a good child of the Infant
Jesus.

"It's nearly one o'clock. You can't go back to the East End to-night,"
she whispered.

"Oh, I must, I must," I said, getting up and making for the door. But
before I had reached it my limbs gave way, whether from the strain of
emotion or physical weakness, and if it had not been for Angela I should
have dropped to the floor.

After that she would hear of no excuses. I must stay until morning. I
could sleep in her own bed in the other room, and she could lay a
mattress for herself on the floor by the side of Giovanni's. There
would be no great sacrifice in that. It was going to be one of
Giovanni's bad nights, and she was likely to be up and down all the time
anyway.

Half an hour later I was in bed in a little room that was separated by a
thin papered partition from the room of the poor consumptive, and
Angela, who had brought me a cup of hot milk, was saying in a whisper:

"He's very bad. The doctor says he can't last longer than a week. Sister
Veronica (you remember her, she's Mildred Bankes that used to be) tried
to get him into a home for the dying. It was all arranged, too, but at
the last moment he wouldn't go. He told them that, if they wanted to
separate him from Agnes, they had better bring his coffin because he
would be dead before they got him to the door."

When she had gone I lay a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds
on the other side of the partition.

Giovanni awoke with an alarming fit of coughing, and in the querulous,
plaintive, fretful, sometimes angry tones which invalids have, he
grumbled at Angela and then cried over her, saying what a burden he was
to her, while she, moving about the room in her bare feet, coaxed and
caressed him, and persuaded him to take his milk or his medicine.

Through all this I would hear at intervals the drumming noises of the
singing downstairs, which sounded in my ears (as the singers were
becoming more and more intoxicated) like the