‘Well, Mary?’ says ’e.

‘Well, Bill?’ says she.

‘Is that my kid?’ says ’e.

‘Whose else’s would it be?’ says she, flashing up at him; ’ain’t it enough to deceive a girl, and desert her, without throwing mud in her face on the top of it all?  Whose else’s should the child be but yours?’

‘Go easy,’ says Bill, ’I didn’t mean that, my girl.  Look ’ere, says ’e, ’I got out of that scrape, thanks to your father, and I want to let bygones be bygones, and I’ll marry you to-morrow, if you like, and be a father to the kid.’

Then Mary, she stood up on her feet, with the little one in ’er arms.

‘Marry you!’ says she, ’I wouldn’t marry you if you was the only man in the world.  Me marry a man as could serve a girl as you served me?  Not if it was to save me from hanging?  Me give the kid a father like you?  Thank God, the child’s my own, and you can’t touch it.  I tell you,’ says she, ’shame and all, I’d rather have things as they are, than have married you in church and ’ave found out afterwards what a cowardly beast you are.’

And with that she walks past ’im, looking like a queen, and down into her cabin; and ‘e was left a-standin’ there sucking the end of his stick and looking like a fool.

‘I think, perhaps,’ says I afterwards, ’you ought to ’ave let ’im make an honest woman of you.’

‘I’m as honest as I want to be,’ says she, ’and the child is all my own now.’  So no more was said.

And things went on the same old sleepy way, like they always do on the river, and we forgot the shame almost, in the pleasure of having the little thing about us.  And so the time went on, till one day at Maidstone a Sister of Charity with one of those white caps and a big cross round her neck, come down to the water’s side inquiring for Tom Allbutt.

‘That’s me,’ says my old man.

‘There’s a young man ill in hospital,’ says she.  ’He’s dying, I’m afraid, and he wants to see you before he goes.  It’s typhoid fever, but that’s over now; he’s dying of weakness, they say.’

And when we asked the young man’s name, of course it was Bill Jarvis.  So we left my Pretty in charge of the barge, and my old man and me, we went up to the hospital.

Bill was so changed you wouldn’t ’ardly ’ave known ’im.  From being a fleshy, red-cheeked young fellow, he’d come to be as thin as a skeleton, and ’is eyes seemed to fill half ’is face.

‘I want to marry Mary,’ says ’e.  ’I’m dying, I can’t do her and the kid no ’arm now, and I should die easier if she’d marry me here; the chaplain would do it—­he said so.’

My old man didn’t say nothin’, but says I, ’I would dearly like her to be made an honest woman of.’