"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 could 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 get work, or that I should get it immediately, the only open question being what work and where.

Hitherto I had thought that, being quick with my pen, I might perhaps become secretary to somebody; but now, remembering the typist's story ("firms don't like it"), and wishing to run no risks in respect of my child, I put that expectation away and began to soar to higher things.

How vain they were! Remembering some kind words the Reverend Mother had said about me at the convent (where I had taken more prizes than Alma, though I had never mentioned it before) I told myself that I, too, was an educated woman. I knew Italian, French and German, and having heard that some women could make a living by translating books for publishers I thought I might do the same.

Nay, I could even write books myself. I was sure I could--one book at all events, about friendless girls who have to face the world for themselves, and all good women would read it (some good men also), because they would see that it must be true.

Oh, how vain were my thoughts! Yet in another sense they were not all vanity, for I was not thinking of fame, or what people would say about what I should write, but only what I should get for it.

I should get money, not a great deal perhaps, yet enough for baby and me, that we might have that cottage in the country, covered with creepers and roses, where Isabel would run about the grass by and by, and pluck the flowers in the garden.

"So what have _you_ got to cry about, you ridiculous thing," I thought while I hurried along, with a high step now, as if my soul had been in my feet.

But a mother's visions of the future are like a mirage (always gleaming with the fairy palaces which her child is to inhabit some day), and I am not the first to find her shadows fade away.

I must have been walking for some time, feeling no weariness at all, when I came to the bridge by Bow Church. There I had intended to take a tram, but not being tired I went on farther, thinking every stage I could walk would be so much money to the good.

I was deep in the Mile End Road, when a chilling thought came to me. It was the thought of the distance that would divide me from my child, making my visits to her difficult, and putting it out of my power to reach her quickly (perhaps even to know in time) if, as happened to children, she became suddenly and dangerously ill.

I remembered the long line of telescoping thoroughfares I had passed through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world.

Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to such a dangerous separation.

"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."

Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish, and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces, slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels, I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish children danced.

I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at the corner. In large written characters it ran:

_Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages.

Apply No. ---- Washington Street_.

How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.

A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby.

I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she said, in a nasal and guttural voice:

"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."

Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick black hair, and such a dear good face.

I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of catechism.

Was I a seamstress? No, but I wished to become one. Had I aiver vorked on vaistcoats? I hadn't, but I could do anything with my needle.

Perhaps the urgency of my appeal, and more probably the pressure of her own need, weighed with the Jewess, for after reflection, and an eager whisper from her daughter (who was looking at me with kindling eyes), she said,