he viewed the matter—­and consequently quite beyond the range of his sympathies.  He listened to all she had to say, beheld unmoved her miserable tears, and, when she became silent, coolly delivered his ultimatum.  For her he would procure a situation, whereby she could earn her living, and therewith his relations to her would end; the child he would put into other hands and have it cared for, but Lotty would lose sight of it for ever.  The girl hesitated, but the maternal instinct was very strong in her; the little one began to cry, as if fearing separation from its mother; she decided to refuse.

“Then I shall go on the streets!” she exclaimed passionately.  “There’s nothing else left for me.”

“You can go where you please,” returned Abraham.

She tried to obtain work, of course fruitlessly.  She got into debt with her landlady, and only took the fatal step when at length absolutely turned adrift.

That was not quite ten years gone by; she was then but eighteen.  Let her have lost her child, and she would speedily have fallen into the last stages of degradation.  But the little one lived.  She had called it Ida, a name chosen from some tale in the penny weeklies, which were the solace of her misery.  She herself took the name of Starr, also from a page of fiction.

Balancing the good and evil of this life in her dark little mind, Lotty determined that one thing there was for which it was worth while to make sacrifices, one end which she felt strong enough to keep persistently in view.  Ida should be brought up “respectably”—­ it was her own word; she should be kept absolutely free from the contamination of her mother’s way of living; nay, should, when the time came, go to school, and have good chances.  And at the end of all this was a far-off hope, a dim vision of possibilities, a vague trust that her daughter might perchance prove for her a means of returning to that world of “respectability” from which she was at present so hopelessly shut out.  She would keep making efforts to get into an honest livelihood as often as an occasion presented itself; and Ida should always live with “respectable” people, cost what it might.

The last resolution was only adhered to for a few months.  Lotty could not do without her little one, and eventually brought it back to her own home.  It is not an infrequent thing to find little children living in disorderly houses.  In the profession Lotty had chosen there are, as in all professions, grades and differences.  She was by no means a vicious girl, she had no love of riot for its own sake; she would greatly have preferred a decent mode of life, had it seemed practicable.  Hence she did not associate herself with the rank and file of abandoned women; her resorts were not the crowded centres; her abode was not in the quarters consecrated to her business.  In all parts of London there are quiet by-streets of houses given up to lodging-letting, wherein are to be found many landladies, who, good