ank, I was
almost happy in my poor surroundings, and if it was a cage I had fixed
myself in there was always a bird singing inside of it--the bird that
sang in my own bosom.

"When Isabel Mary comes everything will he all right," I used to think.

This went on for many weeks and perhaps it might have gone on until my
time was full but for something which, occurring under my eyes, made me
tremble with the fear that the life I was living and the hope I was
cherishing were really very wrong and selfish.

Of my landlady, Mrs. Williams, I saw little. She was a rather hard but
no doubt heavily-laden woman, who had to "do" for a swarm of children,
besides two young men lodgers who lived in the kitchen and slept in the
room behind mine. Her husband was a quiet man (a carter at the dairy)
whom I never saw at all except on the staircase at ten o'clock at night,
when, after winding the tall clock on the landing, he went upstairs to
bed in his stocking feet.

But the outstanding member of the family for me was a shock-headed girl
of fourteen called Emmerjane, which was a running version of Emma Jane.

I understood that Emmerjane was the illegitimate daughter of Mrs.
Williams's dead sister, and that she had been born in Carnarvon, which
still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold.

Emmerjane was the drudge of the family, and I first saw her in the
street at dusk, mothering a brood of her little cousins, taking Hughie
by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of
Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans.

Afterwards she became my drudge also--washing my floor, bringing up my
coals, and cleaning my grate, for sixpence a week, and giving me a great
deal of information about my neighbours for nothing.

Thus she told me, speaking broad cockney with a Welsh accent, that the
people opposite were named Wagstaffe and that the creaking noise I heard
was that of a mangle, which Mrs. Wagstaffe had to keep because her
husband was a drunkard, who stole her money and came home "a-Saturday
nights, when the public-houses turned out, and beat her somethink
shockin'," though she always forgave him the next day and then the
creaking went on as before.

But the greatest interest of this weird little woman, who had a
premature knowledge of things a child ought not to know, was in a house
half-way down the street on the other side, where steam was always
coming from the open door to the front kitchen.

The