because girls always changed their name and she looked like crying when she said this.  I had a photograph of Mary’s that I always carried with me to show anybody who might have seen her without knowing her and the girl said if I’d trust her with it for a week she’d find Mary if she was in Brisbane and meet me.  So I lent it to her.  And we were just talking a bit and she was telling me that she was from London and that when she was a little girl a great book-writer used to pat her on the head and call her a pretty little thing and give her pennies and how she’d run away from home with a young officer, who got into trouble afterwards and came out to Australia without her and how she came out to find him and would some day, when a policeman came along and asked us what we were doing.  She said we weren’t doing anything and that he’d better mind his business and he said he knew her and she’d better keep a civil tongue in her head.  Then he wanted to know what my name was and where I lived and the girl told me not to tell him or he’d play a trick on me and I didn’t.  But I told him I worked at dressmaking and roomed with another girl and he gave a kind of laugh and said he thought so and that if I didn’t give him my name and address I’d have to come along with him.  I began to cry and the girl told him he ought to be ashamed of himself ruining a poor hard-working girl who was looking for her sister and he only laughed again and said he knew all about that.  I don’t know what would have happened only just then an oldish man came along, wearing spectacles and with a kind sharp face, who stopped and asked what was the matter.  The policeman was very civil to him and seemed to know him and told him that I wouldn’t give him my address and that I was no good and that he was only doing his duty.  The girl called the policeman names and told how it really was, only not my name, and the man looked at me and told the policeman I was shabby enough to be honest and that he’d answer for me and the policeman touched his hat and said ‘good-night, sir,’ and went on.  Then the man told me I’d had a narrow escape and that it should be a lesson to me to keep out of bad company and I told him the girl had told the truth and he laughed, but not like the policeman, and said that was all the more reason to be careful because policemen could do what they liked with dressmakers who had no friends.  Then be pulled out some money and told me to be a good girl and offered it to me, so kindly, but of course I didn’t take it.  Then he shook hands and walked off.  There are kind people in the world, Ned, but we don’t always meet them when we need them.  I didn’t know then how much he did for me or what cruel, wicked laws there are.

“Next week I met the girl again.  I wanted so to find Mary I didn’t care for all the policemen.  I knew when I saw her coming that she’d found her.  I didn’t seem to care much, only as though something had snapped.  It was only afterwards, when Mary was dead, that I used to get nearly crazy.  I never told anybody, not even my room-mate, that I’d found her.