She asked me if I was going far, and I said no, only to the other end of London, the edge of the country, to Ilford.

“Ilford!” she cried.  “Why, that’s miles and miles away.  You’ll have to ’bus it to Aldgate, then change for Bow, and then tram it through Stratford Market.”

I told her I preferred to walk, being such a good walker, and she gave me a searching look, but said no more on that subject.

Then she asked me how old baby was and whether I was nursing her myself, and I answered that baby was six weeks and I had been forced to wean her, being supposed to be delicate, and besides . . .

“Ah, perhaps you are putting her out to nurse,” she said, and I answered yes, and that was the reason I was going to Ilford.

“I see,” she said, with another searching look, and then it flashed upon me that she had formed her own conclusions about what had befallen me.

When we came to a great building in a side street on the left, with ambulance vans passing in and out of a wide gateway, she said she was sorry she could not carry baby any further, because she was due in the hospital, where the house-doctor would be waiting for her.

“But I hope baby’s nurse will be a good one.  They’re not always that, you know.”

I was not quite so happy when the hospital nurse left me.  The parcel on my wrist was feeling heavier than before, and my feet were beginning to drag.  But I tried to keep a good heart as I faced the crowded thoroughfares—­Newgate with its cruel old prison, the edge of St. Paul’s, and the corner of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and so on into Cheapside.

Cheapside itself was almost impassable.  Merchants, brokers, clerks, and city men generally in tall silk hats were hurrying and sometimes running along the pavement, making me think of the river by my father’s house, whose myriad little waves seemed to my fancy as a child to be always struggling to find out which could get to Murphy’s Mouth the first and so drown itself in the sea.

People were still very kind to me, though, and if anybody brushed me in passing he raised his hat; and if any one pushed me accidentally he stopped to say he was sorry.

Of course baby was the talisman that protected me from harm; and what I should have done without her when I got to the Mansion house I do not know, for that seemed to be the central heart of all the London traffic, with its motor-buses and taxi-cabs going in different directions and its tremendous tides of human life flowing every way.

But just as I was standing, dazed and deafened on the edge of a triangle of streets, looking up at a great building that was like a rock on the edge of a noisy sea, and bore on its face the startling inscription, “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof,” a big policeman, seeing me with baby in my arms, held up his hand to the drivers and shouted to the pedestrians ("Stand a-one side, please"), and then led me safely across, as if the Red Sea had parted to let us pass.