in this journal,
which no eyes but mine ever look on; yet I must honestly confess to
myself that here I am, at nearly one in the morning, sitting up in a
state of serious uneasiness because Mary has not yet come home.

I walked with her this morning to the place where she works, and tried
to lead her into talking of the relations she has got who are still
alive. My motive in doing this was to see if she dropped anything in
the course of conversation which might suggest a way of helping
her interests with those who are bound to give her all reasonable
assistance. But the little I could get her to say to me led to nothing.
Instead of answering my questions about her step-mother and her brother,
she persisted at first, in the strangest way, in talking of her father,
who was dead and gone, and of one Noah Truscott, who had been the worst
of all the bad friends he had, and had taught him to drink and game.
When I did get her to speak of her brother, she only knew that he had
gone out to a place called Assam, where they grew tea. How he was doing,
or whether he was there still, she did not seem to know, never having
heard a word from him for years and years past.

As for her step-mother, Mary not unnaturally flew into a passion the
moment I spoke of her. She keeps an eating-house at Hammersmith, and
could have given Mary good employment in it; but she seems always to
have hated her, and to have made her life so wretched with abuse and ill
usage that she had no refuge left but to go away from home, and do her
best to make a living for herself. Her husband (Mary's father) appears
to have behaved badly to her, and, after his death, she took the wicked
course of revenging herself on her step-daughter. I felt, after this,
that it was impossible Mary could go back, and that it was the hard
necessity of her position, as it is of mine, that she should struggle
on to make a decent livelihood without assistance from any of her
relations. I confessed as much as this to her; but I added that I would
try to get her employment with the persons for whom I work, who pay
higher wages, and show a little more indulgence to those under them than
the people to whom she is now obliged to look for support.

I spoke much more confidently than I felt about being able to do this,
and left her, as I thought, in better spirits than usual. She promised
to be back to-night to tea at nine o'clock, and now it is nearly one in
the morning, and she is not h