I remember that the Jew’s threat made no impression upon my mind.  It mattered very little to me where I was to lodge next week or what roof was to cover me.

When I reached the Olivers’ that morning I found baby distinctly worse.  Even the brandy would not stay on her stomach and hence her strength was plainly diminishing.  I sat for some time looking steadfastly into my child’s face, and then I asked myself, as millions of mothers must have done before me, why my baby should suffer so.  Why?  Why?  Why?

There seemed to be no answer to that question except one.  Baby was suffering because I was poor.  If I had not been poor I could have taken her into the country for fresh air and sunshine, where she would have recovered as the doctor had so confidently assured me.

And why was I poor?  I was poor because I had refused to be enslaved by my father’s authority when it was vain and wrong, or my husband’s when it, was gross and cruel, and because I had obeyed the highest that was in me—­the call of love.

And now God looked down on the sufferings of my baby, who was being killed for my conduct—­killed by my poverty!

I tremble to say what wild impulses came at that thought.  I felt that if my baby died and I ever stood before God to be judged I should judge Him in return.  I should ask Him why, if He were Almighty, He permitted the evil in the world to triumph over the good, and if He were our heavenly Father why He allowed innocent children to suffer?  Was there any human father who could be so callous, so neglectful, so cruel, as that?

I dare say it was a terrible thing to bring God to the bar of judgment, to be judged by His poor weak ignorant creature; but it was also terrible to sit with a dying baby on my lap (I thought mine was dying), and to feel that there was nothing—­not one thing—­I could do to relieve its sufferings.

My faith went down like a flood during the heavy hours of that day—­all that I had been taught to believe about God’s goodness and the marvellous efficacy of the Sacraments of His Church.

I thought of the Sacrament of my marriage, which the Pope told me had been sanctioned by my Redeemer under a natural law that those who entered into it might live together in peace and love—­and then of my husband and his brutal infidelities.

I thought of the Sacrament of my baby’s baptism, which was to exorcise all the devils out of my child—­and then of the worst devil in the world, poverty, which was taking her very life.

After that a dark shadow crossed my soul, and I told myself that since God was doing nothing, since He was allowing my only treasure to be torn away from me, I would fight for my child’s life as any animal fights for her young.

By this time a new kind of despair had taken hold of me.  It was no longer the paralysing despair but the despair that has a driving force in it.

“My child shall not die,” I thought.  “At least poverty shall not kill her!”