All that followed was like a dream.  I would have none touch my dead save myself and her favorite sister, who was with us at the last; she wept over her, but I could not, not even when they hid her beneath the coffin-lid, nor all that weary way to Kensal Green, whither we took her to lay her with her husband and her baby-son.  I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and buried, and the home destroyed ere it was fairly made.  My “house was left unto” me “desolate”, and the rooms filled with sunshine, but unlighted by her presence, seemed to reiterate to me:  “You are all alone “.

XI.

The two months after my mother’s death were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of tolerably hard struggle.  The little house in Colby Road taxed my slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet successful.  I do not know how I should have managed but for the help, ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott.  During this time I wrote for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural v. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very valuable.  Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to “have my dinner in town”, the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence.  If I was away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many a time the supper there was of real physical value to me.  Well might I write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead:  “It was Thomas Scott whose house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this generous noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and overdone, from a long day’s study in the British Museum, with scarce food to struggle through the day—­he never knew how his genial ‘Well, little lady’, in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of my life.  To no living man or woman—­save one—­do I owe the debt of gratitude that I owe to Thomas Scott.”

The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at least, never suffered a solitary touch of want.  Mary was a wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that could be put into a servant’s hands, and she also made the little place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go into it.  Recalling those days of “hard living”, I can now look on them without regret.  More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips:  “I am hungry”, without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and without curing that pain, at least for the moment.