e to his feet, and said:

"You don't want yer baiby to be give over to the Guardians for the sake
of a week or two, do you?"

That settled everything. I took out my purse and with a trembling hand
laid my last precious sovereign on the table.

A moment or two after this Mr. Oliver, who had put on his coat and a
cloth cap, made for the door.

"Evenin', ma'am," he said, and with what grace I could muster I bade him
good-bye.

"You aren't a-going to the 'Sun' to-night, are you, Ted?" asked Mrs.
Oliver.

"Club," said the man, and the door clashed behind him.

I breathed more freely when he was gone, and his wife (from whose face
the look of fear vanished instantly) was like another woman.

"Goodness gracious," she cried, with a kind of haggard hilarity,
"where's my head? Me never offering you a cup of tea, and you looking so
white after your journey."

I took baby back into my arms while she put on the kettle, set a black
tea-pot on the hob to warm, laid a piece of tablecloth and a thick cup
and saucer on the end of the table, and then knelt on the fender to
toast a little bread, talking meantime (half apologetically and half
proudly) about her husband.

He was a bricklayer by trade, and sometimes worked at the cemetery which
I could see at the other side of the road (behind the long railings and
the tall trees), but was more generally engaged as a sort of fighting
lieutenant to a Labour leader whose business it was to get up strikes.
Before they were married he had been the "Light Weight Champion of
Whitechapel," and those were photos of his fights which I could see over
the mantelpiece, but "he never did no knocking of people about now,"
being "quiet and matrimonual."

In spite of myself my heart warmed to the woman. I wonder it did not
occur to me there and then that, living in constant dread of her
tyrannical husband, she would always be guilty of the dissimulation I
had seen an example of already and that the effect of it would be
reflected upon my child.

It did not. I only told myself that she was clearly fond of children and
would be a kind nurse to my baby. It even pleased me, in my foolish
motherly selfishness, that she was a plain-featured person, whom baby
could never come to love as she would, I was sure, love me.

I felt better after I had taken tea, and as it was then seven o'clock,
and the sun was setting horizontally through the cypresses of the
cemetery, I knew it was time to go.

I coul