“I never thought of that.  Get back, Rosie!” Mrs. Gibbons made effort to catch her little daughter, but this time the child wriggled down from the foot of the bed and came toward me, hands behind her back, and stared up into my face.

“Whatcha name?”

I told her and asked hers, and without further preliminaries she came close to me and hunched her shoulders to be taken in my lap.

“We’ve got to go—­we’re bound to go, Miss Dandridge!” With a leap Bettina was out of her chair, and, catching the little girl by the hand, she drew her from me and dangled in front of her a once-silvered mesh-bag, took from it a penny, and gave it to her; then she turned to Mrs. Gibbons.

“We’re awful glad we’ve seen you.”  Bettina nodded gravely to the woman on the bed.  “And of course we won’t tell anybody about Jimmy not being twelve yet; but Miss Heath wants him to go back to school, and she’s coming to see you soon about it.  We’ve got to go now.”

In a manner I could not understand, Bettina, who had gotten up and was now standing behind Mrs. Gibbons, beckoned to me mysteriously, and, fearing the latter might become aware of her violent movements, I, too, got up and shook hands with my hostess.

“I will see you in a few days,” I said.  “There’s no chance for Jimmy if he doesn’t have some education.  He ought to go back to school.”

“Yes ’m, I know he ought, but he can’t go.”  Jimmy’s mother shook hands, limply.  “The pickle-factory where I used to work is turning off hands every week, and I can’t get nothing to do there.  I don’t know how to do nothing but pickles.  Sometimes I gets a little sewing at home, but I ain’t a sewer.  The Charities sends me a basket of keep-life-in-you groceries every now and then, and the city gives me some coal and wood when there’s enough to go round more than once, but I need Jimmy’s money for the rent.”

“If the rent were paid would you let him go back to school?”

“Yes ’m.”  The dull voice quickened not at all.  “I’d be glad to let him go.  I don’t want him to work, but them that don’t know how it is can’t understand.  You-all must come again.  Good-by.  Come back here, Rosie.  You’ll catch your death out there.  Good-by.”

In the open air, which felt good after the steaming heat of the bedroom-kitchen, Bettina and I walked for a few moments in silence, and then, slipping her arm in mine, she looked up at me with wise little eyes.

“Please excuse me for telling you, Miss Dandridge, but you’re new yet in the places you’ve been going to since you came to Scarborough Square, and you’ll have to be careful about taking the children on your lap and in your arms, if they’re babies.  You love children, and you just naturally hold out your hands to them, but if you don’t know them very well, you’d better not.  All of them ain’t healthy, and hardly any—­”

Bettina stopped and, standing still, looked straight ahead of her at a man and a young woman crossing the street some little distance from us.  Then she looked up at me.  The man was Selwyn.  The girl with him was the odd and elfish little creature who had been hurt in Scarborough Square and whom he had helped bring in to Mrs. Mundy.