y great ignorance and great love I
had been depriving myself for the sake of my child, and now I learned
that I had all the time been doing it a grave and perhaps life-long
injury!

Trying to make amends I sent out for some of the expensive foods the
doctor had ordered me, but when they were cooked I found to my dismay
that I had lost the power of digesting them.

My pain at this discovery was not lessened next day when my Welsh
landlady brought up a nurse whom I had asked her to engage for me.

The woman was a human dumpling with a discordant voice, and her first
interest, like that of the doctor, seemed to centre in her fee.

She told me that her usual terms were a guinea for the fortnight, but
when she saw my face fall (for I could not help thinking how little I
had left) she said:

"Some ladies don't need a fortnight, though. Mrs. Wagstaffe, for
instance, she never has no more than five days, and on the sixth she's
back at her mangle. So if five will do, ma'am, perhaps ten and six won't
hurt you."

I agreed, and the nurse was rolling her ample person out of my room when
my Welsh landlady said:

"But her's not eating enough to keep a linnet, look you."

And then my nurse, who was what the doctor calls a croaker, began on a
long series of stories of ladies who, having "let themselves down" had
died, either at childbirth or soon afterwards.

"It's _after_ a lady feels it if she has to nurse her baby," said the
nurse, "and I couldn't be responsible neither for you nor the child if
you don't do yourself justice."

This was a still more terrible possibility--the possibility that I might
die and leave my child behind me. The thought haunted me all that day
and the following night, but the climax came next morning, when
Emmerjane, while black-leading my grate, gave me the last news of Maggie
Jones.

Maggie's mother had been "a-naggin' of her to get work," asking if she
had not enough mouths to feed "without her bringin' another."

Maggie had at first been afraid to look for employment, thinking
everybody knew of her trouble. But after her mother had put the young
minister from Zion on to her to tell her to be "obejent" she had gone
out every day, whether the weather was good or bad or "mejum."

This had gone on for three months (during which Maggie used to stay out
late because she was afraid to meet her mother's face) until one wet
night, less than a week ago, she had come home drenched to the skin,
taken