I agreed, and the nurse was rolling her ample person out of my room when my Welsh landlady said: 

“But her’s not eating enough to keep a linnet, look you.”

And then my nurse, who was what the doctor calls a croaker, began on a long series of stories of ladies who, having “let themselves down” had died, either at childbirth or soon afterwards.

“It’s after a lady feels it if she has to nurse her baby,” said the nurse, “and I couldn’t be responsible neither for you nor the child if you don’t do yourself justice.”

This was a still more terrible possibility—­the possibility that I might die and leave my child behind me.  The thought haunted me all that day and the following night, but the climax came next morning, when Emmerjane, while black-leading my grate, gave me the last news of Maggie Jones.

Maggie’s mother had been “a-naggin’ of her to get work,” asking if she had not enough mouths to feed “without her bringin’ another.”

Maggie had at first been afraid to look for employment, thinking everybody knew of her trouble.  But after her mother had put the young minister from Zion on to her to tell her to be “obejent” she had gone out every day, whether the weather was good or bad or “mejum.”

This had gone on for three months (during which Maggie used to stay out late because she was afraid to meet her mother’s face) until one wet night, less than a week ago, she had come home drenched to the skin, taken to her bed, “sickened for somethink” and died.

Three days after Emmerjane told me this story a great solemnity fell on our street.

It was Saturday, when the children do not go to school, but, playing no games, they gathered in whispering groups round the house with the drawn blinds, while their mothers stood bareheaded at the doors with their arms under their aprons and their hidden hands over their mouths.

I tried not to know what was going on, but looking out at the last moment I saw Maggie Jones’s mother, dressed in black, coming down her steps, with her eyes very red and her hard face (which was seamed with labour) all wet and broken up.

The “young minister” followed (a beardless boy who could have known nothing of the tragedy of a woman’s life), and stepping into the midst of the group of the congregation from Zion, who had gathered there with their warm Welsh hearts full of pity for the dead girl, he gave out a Welsh hymn, and they sang it in the London street, just as they had been used to do at the cottage doors in the midst of their native mountains: 

     “Bydd myrdd o ryfeddodau
     Ar doriad boreu wawr.”

I could look no longer, so I turned back into my room, but at the next moment I heard the rumble of wheels and knew that Maggie Jones was on her way to her last mother of all—­the Earth.

During the rest of that day I could think of nothing but Maggie’s child, and what was to become of it, and next morning when Emmerjane came up she told me that the “young minister” was “a-gettin’ it into the ’ouse.”