people who lived there were named Jones. Mrs. Jones "washed" and had
a bed-ridden old mother (with two shillings from the Guardians) and a
daughter named Maggie.

Maggie Jones, who was eighteen, and very pretty, used to work in the
dairy, but the foreman had "tiken advantage of her" and she had just had
a baby.

This foreman was named Owen Owens and he lived at the last number on our
side, where two unmarried sisters "kept house" for him and sat in the
"singing seat" at Zion.

Maggie thought it was the sisters' fault that Owen Owens did not marry
her, so she conceived a great scheme for "besting" them, and this was
the tragedy which, through Emmerjane's quick little eyes and her
cockney-Welsh tongue, came to me in instalments day by day.

When her baby was a month old Maggie dressed it up "fine" and took it to
the photographers for its "card di visit." The photographs were a long
time coming, but when they came they were "heavenly lovely" and Maggie
"cried to look at them."

Then she put one in an envelope and addressed it to Owen Owens, and
though it had only to cross the street, she went out after dark to a
pillar-box a long way off lest anybody should see her posting it.

Next day she said, "He'll have it now, for he always comes home to
dinner. He'll take it up to his bedroom, look you, and stand it on the
washstand, and if either of those sisters touch it he'll give them
what's what."

After that she waited anxiously for an acknowledgment, and every time
the postman passed down our street her pretty pale face would be at the
door, saying, "Anything for me to-day?" or "Are you _sure_ there's
nothing for me, postman?"

At length a letter came, and Maggie Jones trembled so much that she
dared not open it, but at last she tripped up to her room to be "all of
herself," and then . . . then there was a "wild screech," and when
Emmerjane ran upstairs Maggie was stretched out on the floor in a dead
faint, clutching in her tight hand the photograph which Owen Owens had
returned with the words, written in his heavy scrawl across the
face--_Maggie Jones's bastard_.

It would be impossible to say how this incident affected me. I felt as
if a moral earthquake had opened under my feet.

What had I been doing? In looking forward to the child that was to come
to me I had been thinking only of my own comfort--my own consolation.

But what about the child itself?

If my identity ever became known--and it might at any