“And then she said—­I can remember this bit—­then she said, ’And so, in my terrible distress, dear Mrs. Sabre, I am throwing myself on your mercy, and begging you, imploring you, for the love of God to take in me and my little baby and let me work for you and do anything for you and bless you and ask God’s blessing for ever upon you and teach my little baby to pray for you as—­’ something or other, I forget.  And then she said a lot of hysterical things about working her fingers to the bone for Mrs. Sabre, and knowing she was a wicked girl and not fit to be spoken to by any one, and was willing, to sleep in a shed in the garden and never to open her mouth, and all that sort of thing; and all the way through ‘my little baby,’ ‘my little baby.’  Sabre said it was awful.  Also she said,—­I’m telling you just what Sabre told me, and he told me this bit deliberately, as you might say—­also she said that she didn’t want to pretend she was more sinned against than sinning, but that if Mrs. Sabre knew the truth she might judge her less harshly and be more willing to help her.  Yes, Sabre told me that....

“All right.  Well, there was the appeal, ‘there was this piteous appeal’, as Sabre said, and there was Sabre profoundly touched by it, and there was his wife bridling over it—­one up against her husband who’d always stuck up for the girl, d’you see, and about two million up in justification of her own opinion of her.  There they were; and then Sabre said, turning the letter over in his hands, ’Well, what are you going to do about it?’

“You can imagine his wife’s tone. ’Do about it!  Do about it!  What on earth do you think I’m going to do about it?’

“And Sabre said, ’Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor creature in.’

“That’s what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said it—­all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly well imagine his wife’s face as she heard him, by Jove, I can.  She was furious.  Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn’t.  Sabre said she worked herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that cut him like a knife—­language like speaking of the baby as ‘that brat.’  It made him wince.  It would—­the sort of chap he is.  And he said that the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl’s position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

“He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case.  He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said, ’Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my wife.  I felt that the girl had a claim on us.  In the first place, she’d turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a claim, even