Then she asked me if I would like a ticket for a dress rehearsal on Christmas Eve of a Christmas pantomime.

“The audience will be chiefly children out of the lanes and alleys round about, but perhaps you won’t mind that,” she said.

I told her I should be overjoyed, and at two o’clock the following afternoon I was in my seat at the corner of the dress-circle of the great theatre, from which I could see both the stage and the auditorium.

The vast place was packed with children from ceiling to floor, and I could see the invisible hands of thousands of mothers who had put the girls into clean pinafores and brushed and oiled the tousled heads of the boys.

How their eager faces glistened!  How sad they looked when the wicked sisters left Cinderella alone in the kitchen!  How bright when the glittering fairy godmother came to visit her!  How their little dangling feet clapped together with joy when the pretty maid went off to the ball behind six little ponies which pranced along under the magical moonlight in the falling snow!

But the part of the performance which they liked best was their own part when, in the interval, the band struck up one of the songs they sang in their lanes and alleys: 

     “Yew aw the enny, Oi em ther bee,
     Oi’d like ter sip ther enny from those red lips yew see.”

That was so loaded with the memory of one of the happiest days of my life (the day I went with Martin to see the Scotia) that, in the yearning of the motherhood still unborn in me, I felt as if I should like to gather the whole screaming houseful of happy children to my breast.

But oh why, why, why, does not Providence warn us when we are on the edge of tragic things?

The pantomime rehearsal being over I was hurrying home (for the evening was cold, though I was so warm within) when I became aware of a number of newsmen who were flying up from the direction of the Strand, crying their papers at the top of their voice.

I did not usually listen to such people, but I was compelled to do so now, for they were all around me.

“Paper—­third e’shen—­loss of the Sco-sha.”

The cry fell on me like a thunderbolt.  An indescribable terror seized me.  I felt paralysed and stood dead still.  People were buying copies of the papers, and at first I made a feeble effort to do the same.  But my voice was faint; the newsman did not hear me and he went flying past.

“Paper—­third e’shen—­reported loss of the Sco-sha.”

After that I dared not ask for a paper.  Literally I dared not.  I dared not know the truth.  I dared not see the dreadful fact in print.

So I began to hurry home.  But as I passed through the streets, stunned, stupefied, perspiring, feeling as if I were running away from some malignant curse, the newsmen seemed to be pursuing me, for they were darting out from every street.