When I awoke next morning the last word of the broker’s man seemed to be ringing in my ears.

I knew it was true; I knew I ought to remove baby from the house of the Olivers without another day’s delay, but I was at a loss to know what to do with her.

To bring her to my own room at the Jew’s was obviously impossible, and to advertise for a nurse for my child was to run the risk of falling into the toils of somebody who might do worse than neglect her.

In my great perplexity I recalled the waitress at the restaurant whose child had been moved to a Home in the country, and for some moments I thought how much better it would be that baby should be “bonny and well” instead of pale and thin as she was now.  But when I reflected that if I took her to a public institution I should see her only once a month, I told myself that I could not and would not do so.

“I’ll work my fingers to the bone first,” I thought.

Yet life makes a fearful tug at a woman when it has once got hold of her, and, strangely enough, it was in the Jew’s house that I first came to see that for the child’s own sake I must part with her.

Somewhere about the time of my moving into the back room my employer made a kind of bower of branches and evergreens over the lead-flat roof of an outhouse in his back-yard—­a Succah, as Miriam called it, built in honour of the Feast of Tabernacles, as a symbol of the time when the Israelites in the Wilderness dwelt in booths.

In this Succah the Jew’s family ate all their meals during the seven or eight days of the Jewish feast, and one morning, as I sat at work by my open window, I heard Miriam after breakfast reading something from the Books of Moses.

It was the beautiful story of Jacob parting with Benjamin in the days of the famine, when there was corn in Egypt only—­how the poor old father in his great love could not bring himself to give up his beloved son, although death threatened him; how Judah pleaded with Jacob to send the boy with him into the far country lest they should all die, “both we and thou and also our little ones;” and how at last Jacob said, “If it must be so, do this,” but “if I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.”

It would be hard to say how deeply this story moved me while I listened from my room above.  And now that I thought of it again, I saw that I was only sacrificing my child to my selfish love of her, and therefore the duty of a true mother was to put her into a Home.

It would not be for long.  The work I was doing was not the only kind I was capable of.  After I had liberated myself from the daily extortions of the Olivers I should be free to look about for more congenial and profitable employment; and then by and by baby and I might live together in that sweet cottage in the country (I always pictured it as a kind of Sunny Lodge, with roses looking in at the window of “Mary O’Neill’s little room”) which still shone through my dreams.