living at home again with his wife in the conditions I
described to you when I began. He said nothing to me about the
conditions--about the terms they were on; but I've told you what I saw.
It's important because it was exactly into the situation as I then saw
it that came to pass the thing that came to pass. This:

"The very week after I'd been down there, his wife, reading a letter at
breakfast one morning, gave a kind of a snort (as I can imagine it) and
chucked the letter over to him and said, 'Ha! There's your wonderful
Miss Bright for you! What did I tell you? What do you think of that?
Ha!'

"Those were her very words and her very snorts and what they meant--what
'Your wonderful Miss Bright for you' meant--was, as he explained to me,
that when he was home on leave, with the girl in the house, they were
frequently having words about her, because he thought his wife was a bit
sharp with her, and his wife, for her part, said he was forever sticking
up for her.

"'What do you think of that? Ha!' and she chucked the letter over to
him, and from what I know of her you can imagine her sitting bolt
upright, bridling with virtuous prescience confirmed, watching him,
while he read it.

"While he read it.... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully
pathetic document he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and
stained and badly expressed as if the writer--this girl--this Effie
Bright--was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And
she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a
little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every
sentence calling it 'a little baby'--never a child, or just a baby, but
always 'a little baby,' 'my little baby.' He said it was awful. She
said it was born in December--you remember, old man, it was the previous
March she'd got the sack from them--and that she'd been living in
lodgings with it, and that now she was well enough to move, and had come
to the absolute end of her money, she was being turned out and was at
her wits' end with despair and nearly out of her mind to know what to do
and all that kind of thing. She said her father wouldn't have anything
to do with her, and no one would have anything to do with her--so long
as she kept her little baby. That was her plight: no one would have
anything to do with her while she had the baby. Her father was willing
to take her home, and some kind people had offered to take