of this poor lip was so strong and her tears ran
down so fast that I thought she was going to tell me all her woe, so I
takes her two hands in mine and I says:

"No my dear not now, you had best not try to do it now. Wait for better
times when you have got over this and are strong, and then you shall tell
me whatever you will. Shall it be agreed?"

With our hands still joined she nodded her head many times, and she
lifted my hands and put them to her lips and to her bosom. "Only one
word now my dear" I says. "Is there any one?"

She looked inquiringly "Any one?"

"That I can go to?"

She shook her head.

"No one that I can bring?"

She shook her head.

"No one is wanted by _me_ my dear. Now that may be considered past and
gone."

Not much more than a week afterwards--for this was far on in the time of
our being so together--I was bending over at her bedside with my ear down
to her lips, by turns listening for her breath and looking for a sign of
life in her face. At last it came in a solemn way--not in a flash but
like a kind of pale faint light brought very slow to the face.

She said something to me that had no sound in it, but I saw she asked me:

"Is this death?"

And I says:

"Poor dear poor dear, I think it is."

Knowing somehow that she wanted me to move her weak right hand, I took it
and laid it on her breast and then folded her other hand upon it, and she
prayed a good good prayer and I joined in it poor me though there were no
words spoke. Then I brought the baby in its wrappers from where it lay,
and I says:

"My dear this is sent to a childless old woman. This is for me to take
care of."

The trembling lip was put up towards my face for the last time, and I
dearly kissed it.

"Yes my dear," I says. "Please God! Me and the Major."

I don't know how to tell it right, but I saw her soul brighten and leap
up, and get free and fly away in the grateful look.

* * * * *

So this is the why and wherefore of its coming to pass my dear that we
called him Jemmy, being after the Major his own godfather with Lirriper
for a surname being after myself, and never was a dear child such a
brightening thing in a Lodgings or such a playmate to his grandmother as
Jemmy to this house and me, and always good and minding what he was told
(upon the whole) and soothing for the temper and making everything
pleasanter except when he grew old enough to drop his cap down Wozenham's
Airy and they wou