d not do that, though, without undressing baby and singing her to
sleep. And even then I sat for a while with an aching heart, and Isabel
on my knee, thinking of how I should have to go to bed that night, for
the first time, without her.

Mrs. Oliver, in the meantime, examining the surplus linen which I had
brought in my parcel, was bursting into whispered cries of delight over
it, and, being told I had made the clothes myself, was saying:

"What a wonderful seamstress you might be if you liked, ma'am."

At length the time came to leave baby, and no woman knows the pain of
that experience who has not gone through it.

Though I really believed my darling would be loved and cared for, and
knew she would never miss me, or yet know that I was gone (there was a
pang even in that thought, and in every other kind of comforting), I
could not help it, that, as I was putting my cherub into her cot, my
tears rained down on her little face and awakened her, so that I had to
kneel by her side and rock her to sleep again.

"You'll be good to my child, won't you, Mrs. Oliver?" I said.

"'Deed I will, ma'am," the woman replied.

"You'll bath her every day, will you not?"

"Night and morning. I allus does, ma'am."

"And rinse out her bottle and see that she has nice new milk fresh from
the cow?"

"Sure as sure, ma'am. But don't you fret no more about the child, ma'am.
I've been a mother myself, ma'am, and I'll be as good to your little
angel as if she was my own come back to me."

"God bless you," I said in a burst of anguish, and after remaining a
moment longer on my knees by the cot (speaking with all my heart and
soul, though neither to nurse nor to baby) I rose to my feet, dashed the
tears from my eyes, and ran out of the house.

NINETY-SIXTH CHAPTER

I knew that my eyes were not fit to be seen in the streets, so I dropped
my dark veil and hurried along, being conscious of nothing for some time
except the clang of electric cars and the bustle of passers-by, to whom
my poor little sorrow was nothing at all.

But I had not gone far--I think I had not, though my senses were
confused and vague--before I began to feel ashamed, to take myself to
task, and to ask what I had to cry about.

If I had parted from my baby it was for her own good, and if I had paid
away my last sovereign I had provided for her for a month, I had nothing
to think of now except myself and how to get work.

I never doubted that I should g