Shovel was the person best worth listening to on the subject (observe him, the centre of half a dozen boys), and at first he was for the defence, being a great stickler for the rights of mothers.  But when the case against the girl leaked out, she need not look to him for help.  The police had found the child in a basket down an area, and being knowing ones they pinched it to make it cry, and then they pretended to go away.  Soon the mother, who was watching hard by to see if it fell into kind hands, stole to her baby to comfort it, “and just as she were a kissing on it and blubbering, the perlice copped her.”

“The slut!” said disgusted Shovel, “what did she hang about for?” and in answer to a trembling question from Tommy he replied, decisively, “Six months hard.”

“Next case” was probably called immediately, but Tommy vanished, as if he had been sentenced and removed to the cells.

Never again, unless he wanted six months hard, must he go near Reddy’s home, and so he now frequently accompanied his mother to the place where she worked.  The little room had a funny fireplace called a stove, on which his mother made tea and the girls roasted chestnuts, and it had no other ordinary furniture except a long form.  But the walls were mysterious.  Three of them were covered with long white cloths, which went to the side when you tugged them, and then you could see on rails dozens of garments that looked like nightgowns.  Beneath the form were scores of little shoes, most of them white or brown.  In this house Tommy’s mother spent eight hours daily, but not all of them in this room.  When she arrived the first thing she did was to put Elspeth on the floor, because you cannot fall off a floor; then she went upstairs with a bucket and a broom to a large bare room, where she stayed so long that Tommy nearly forgot what she was like.

While his mother was upstairs Tommy would give Elspeth two or three shoes to eat to keep her quiet, and then he played with the others, pretending to be able to count them, arranging them in designs, shooting them, swimming among them, saying “bow-wow” at them and then turning sharply to see who had said it.  Soon Elspeth dropped her shoes and gazed in admiration at him, but more often than not she laughed in the wrong place, and then he said ironically:  “Oh, in course I can’t do nothin’; jest let’s see you doing of it, then, cocky!”

By the time the girls began to arrive, singly or in twos and threes, his mother was back in the little room, making tea for herself or sewing bits of them that had been torn as they stepped out of a cab, or helping them to put on the nightgowns, or pretending to listen pleasantly to their chatter and hating them all the time.  There was every kind of them, gorgeous ones and shabby ones, old tired ones and dashing young ones, but whether they were the Honorable Mrs. Something or only Jane Anything, they all came to that room for the same purpose:  to get a little gown and