"Out you go! Go! Go!" I cried, and, incredible as it may seem, the man went flying before my face as if I had been a fury.

It would be a long tale to tell of what happened the day following, the next and the next and the next--how baby became less drowsy, but more restless; how being unable to retain her food she grew thinner and thinner; how I wished to send for the doctor, but dared not do so from fear of his fee; how the little money I had left was barely sufficient to buy the food and stimulants which were necessary to baby's cure: how I sat for long hours with my little lamb on my lap straining my dry eyes into her face; and how I cried to God for the life of my child, which was everything I had or wanted.

All this time I was still lodging at the Jew's, returning to it late every night, and leaving it early in the morning, but nothing happened there that seemed to me of the smallest consequence. One day Miriam, looking at me with her big black eyes, said:

"You must take more rest, dear, or you will make yourself ill."

"No, no, I am not ill," I answered, and then remembering how necessary my life was to the life of my child, I said, "I must not be ill."

At last on the Saturday morning--I know now it must have been Saturday, but time did not count with me then--I overheard Mrs. Abramovitch pleading for me with her husband, saying they knew I was in trouble and therefore I ought to have more time to find lodging, another week--three days at all events. But the stern-natured man with his rigid religion was inexorable. It was God's will that I should be punished, and who was he to step in between the All-high and his just retribution?

"The woman is displeasing to God," he said, and then he declared that, the day being Sabbath (the two tall candlesticks and the Sabbath loaves must have been under his eyes at the moment), he would give me until nine o'clock that night, and if I had not moved out by that time he would put my belongings into the street.

I remember that the Jew's threat made no impression upon my mind. It mattered very little to me where I was to lodge next week or what roof was to cover me.

When I reached the Olivers' that morning I found baby distinctly worse.

Even the brandy would not stay on her stomach and hence her strength was plainly diminishing. I sat for some time looking steadfastly into my child's face, and then I asked myself, as millions of mothers must have done before me, why my baby should suffer so. Why? Why? Why?

There seemed to be no answer to that question except one. Baby was suffering because I was poor. If I had not been poor I could have taken her into the country for fresh air and sunshine, where she would have recovered as the doctor had so confidently assured me.

And why was I poor? I was poor because I had refused to be enslaved by my father's authority when it was vain and wrong, or my husband's when it, was gross and cruel, and because I had obeyed the highest that was in me--the call of love.

And now God looked down on the sufferings of my baby, who was being killed for my conduct--killed by my poverty!

I tremble to say what wild impulses came at that thought. I felt that if my baby died and I ever stood before God to be judged I should judge Him in return. I should ask Him why, if He were Almighty, He permitted the evil in the world to triumph over the good, and if He were our heavenly Father why He allowed innocent children to suffer? Was there any _human_ father who could be so callous, so neglectful, so cruel, as that?

I dare say it was a terrible thing to bring God to the bar of judgment, to be judged by His poor weak ignorant creature; but it was also terrible to sit with a dying baby on my lap (I thought mine was dying), and to feel that there was nothing--not one thing--I could do to relieve its sufferings.

My faith went down like a flood during the heavy hours of that day--all that I had been taught to believe about God's goodness and the marvellous efficacy of the Sacraments of His Church.

I thought of the Sacrament of my marriage, which the Pope told me had been sanctioned by my Redeemer under a natural law that those who entered into it might live together in peace and love--and then of my husband and his brutal infidelities.

I thought of the Sacrament of my baby's baptism, which was to exorcise all the devils out of my child--and then of the worst devil in the world, poverty, which was taking her very life.

After that a dark shadow crossed my soul, and I told myself that since God was doing nothing, since He was allowing my only treasure to be torn away from me, I would fight for my child's life as any animal fights for her young.

By this time a new kind of despair had taken hold of me. It was no longer the paralysing despair but the despair that has a driving force in it.

"My child shall not die," I thought. "At least poverty shall not kill her!"

Many times during the day I had heard Mrs. Oliver trying to comfort me with various forms of sloppy sentiment. Children were a great trial, they were allus makin' and keepin' people pore, and it was sometimes better for the dears themselves to be in their 'eavenly Father's boosim.

I hardly listened. It was the same as if somebody were talking to me in my sleep. But towards nightfall my deaf ear caught something about myself--that "it" (I knew what that meant) might be better for me, also, for then I should be free of encumbrances and could marry again.

"Of course you could--you so young and good-lookin'. Only the other day the person at number five could tell me as you were the prettiest woman as comes up the Row, and the Vicar's wife couldn't hold a candle to you.

'Fine feathers makes fine birds,' says she: 'Give your young lady a nice frock and a bit o' colour in her checks, and there ain't many as could best her in the West End neither.'"

As the woman talked dark thoughts took possession of me. I began to think of Angela. I tried not to, but I could not help it.

And then came the moment of _my_ fiercest trial. With a sense of Death hanging over my child I told myself that the only way to drive it off was to make _some great sacrifice_.

Hitherto I had thought of everything I possessed as belonging to baby, but now I felt that _I myself_ belonged to her. I had brought her into the world, and it was my duty to see that she did not suffer.

All this time the inherited instinct of my religion was fighting hard with me, and I was saying many Hail Marys to prevent myself from doing what I meant to do.

"_Hail, Mary, full of grace: the Lord is with thee_ ..."

I felt as if I were losing my reason. But it was of no use struggling against the awful impulse of self-sacrifice (for such I thought it) which had taken hold of my mind, and at last it conquered me.

"I must get money," I thought. "Unless I get money my child will die.

I--must--get--money."

Towards seven o'clock I got up, gave baby to Mrs. Oliver, put on my coat and fixed with nervous fingers my hat and hatpins.

"Where are you going to, pore thing?" asked Mrs. Oliver.

"I am going out. I'll be back in the morning," I answered.

And then, after kneeling and kissing my baby again--my sweet child, my Isabel--I tore the street door open, and pulled it noisily behind me.

ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTH CHAPTER

On reaching the front street, I may have taken the penny tram, for though I had a sense of growing blind and deaf I have vague memories of lights flashing past me and of the clanging of electric cars.

At Bow Church I must have got out (probably to save a further fare) because I recollect walking along the Bow Road between the lights in the shops and the coarse flares from the stalls on the edge of the pavement, where women with baskets on their arms were doing their Saturday night's shopping.

My heart was still strong (sharpened indeed into, poignancy) and I know I was not crying, for at one moment as I passed the mirror in a chemist's window I caught sight of my face and it was fierce as flame.

At another moment, while I was hurrying along, I collided with a drunken woman who was coming out of a public-house with her arm about the neck of a drunken sailor.

"Gawd! Here's the Verging Mary agine!" she cried.

It was the woman who had carried baby, and when I tried to hurry past her she said:

"You think I'm drunk, don't you, dear? So'am. Don't you never get drunk?

No? What a bleedin' fool you are! Want to get out o' this 'ere 'ole?

Tike my tip then--gettin' drunk's on'y way out of it."

Farther on I had to steer my way through jostling companies of young people of both sexes who were going (I thought) the same way as the woman--girls out of the factories with their free walk, and their boisterous "fellers" from the breweries.

It was a cold and savage night. As I approached the side street in which I lived I saw by the light of the arc lamps a small group of people, a shivering straggle of audience, with the hunched-up shoulders of beings thinly clad and badly fed, standing in stupid silence at the corner while two persons wearing blue uniforms (a man in a peaked cap and a young woman in a poke bonnet) sang a Salvation hymn of which the refrain was "It is well, it is well with my soul."

The door of the Jew's house was shut (for the first time in my experience), so I had to knock and wait, and while I waited I could not help but hear the young woman in the poke bonnet pray.

Her prayer was about "raising the standard of Calvary," and making the drunkards and harlots of the East End into "seekers" and "soul yielders"