Those words roused Herminia to a true sense of her duty.  “Sir Anthony Merrick,” she said holding her breath, “that child is my child, and my dear dead Alan’s.  I owe it to Alan,—­I owe it to her,—­to bring her up in the way that Alan would approve of.  I brought her into the world; and my duty is to do what I can to discharge the responsibilities I then undertook to her.  I must train her up to be a useful citizen.  Not for thousands would I resign the delight and honor of teaching my child to those who would teach her what Alan and I believed to be pernicious; who would teach her to despise her mother’s life, and to reject the holy memory of her father.  As I said to you before, that day at Perugia, so I say to you now, ‘Thy money perish with thee.’  You need never again come here to bribe me.”

“Is that final?” Sir Anthony asked.  And Herminia answered with a bow, “Yes, final; quite final.”

Sir Anthony bent his head and left.  Herminia stood face to face with abject poverty.  Spurred by want, by indignation, by terror, by a sense of the absolute necessity for action, she carried her writing materials then and there into Dolly’s sick-room, and sitting by her child’s cot, she began to write, she hardly knew what, as the words themselves came to her.  In a fever of excitement she wrote and wrote and wrote.  She wrote as one writes in the silence of midnight.  It was late before she finished.  When her manuscript was complete, she slipped out and posted it to a weekly paper.  It appeared that same Saturday, and was the beginning of Herminia’s most valuable connection.

But even after she had posted it the distracted mother could not pause or rest.  Dolly tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminia sat watching her.  She pined for sympathy.  Vague ancestral yearnings, gathering head within her, made her long to pray,—­if only there had been anybody or anything to pray to.  She clasped her bloodless hands in an agony of solitude.  Oh, for a friend to comfort!  At last her overwrought feelings found vent in verse.  She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting by Dolly’s side, wrote down her heart-felt prayer, as it came to her that moment,—­

A crowned Caprice is god of the world: 
On his stony breast are his white wings furled. 
No ear to hearken, no eye to see,
No heart to feel for a man hath he.

But his pitiless hands are swift to smite,
And his mute lips utter one word of might
In the clash of gentler souls and rougher—­
‘Wrong must thou do, or wrong must suffer.’

Then grant, O dumb, blind god, at least that we
Rather the sufferers than the doers be.

XVI.

A change came at last, when Dolly was ten years old.  Among the men of whom Herminia saw most in these later days, were the little group of advanced London socialists who call themselves the Fabians.  And among her Fabian friends one of the most active, the most eager, the most individual, was Harvey Kynaston.