but before
I reached the Holborn Viaduct fatigue was beginning to gain on me.

I saw that I must be approaching some great hospital, for hospital
nurses were now passing me constantly, and one of them, who was going my
way, stepped up and asked me to allow her to carry baby. She looked so
sweet and motherly that I let her do so, and as we walked along we
talked.

She asked me if I was going far, and I said no, only to the other end of
London, the edge of the country, to Ilford.

"Ilford!" she cried. "Why, that's miles and miles away. You'll have to
'bus it to Aldgate, then change for Bow, and then tram it through
Stratford Market."

I told her I preferred to walk, being such a good walker, and she gave
me a searching look, but said no more on that subject.

Then she asked me how old baby was and whether I was nursing her myself,
and I answered that baby was six weeks and I had been forced to wean
her, being supposed to be delicate, and besides . . .

"Ah, perhaps you are putting her out to nurse," she said, and I answered
yes, and that was the reason I was going to Ilford.

"I see," she said, with another searching look, and then it flashed upon
me that she had formed her own conclusions about what had befallen me.

When we came to a great building in a side street on the left, with
ambulance vans passing in and out of a wide gateway, she said she was
sorry she could not carry baby any further, because she was due in the
hospital, where the house-doctor would be waiting for her.

"But I hope baby's nurse will be a good one. They're not always that,
you know."

I was not quite so happy when the hospital nurse left me. The parcel on
my wrist was feeling heavier than before, and my feet were beginning to
drag. But I tried to keep a good heart as I faced the crowded
thoroughfares--Newgate with its cruel old prison, the edge of St.
Paul's, and the corner of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and so on into
Cheapside.

Cheapside itself was almost impassable. Merchants, brokers, clerks, and
city men generally in tall silk hats were hurrying and sometimes running
along the pavement, making me think of the river by my father's house,
whose myriad little waves seemed to my fancy as a child to be always
struggling to find out which could get to Murphy's Mouth the first and
so drown itself in the sea.

People were still very kind to me, though, and if anybody brushed me in
passing he raised his hat; and if any one pushed me acc