Choking with anger, I said: 

“Put out your pipe, please.”

“Ma’am to you!”

“Put it out this moment, sir, or I’ll see if I can’t find somebody to make you.”

The bricklayer laughed, then pointed with the shank of his pipe to the two photographs over the mantelpiece, and said: 

“See them?  Them’s me, with my dooks up.  If any friend o’ yourn as is interested in the baiby comes to lay a ’and on me I’ll see if I’ve forgot ’ow to use ’em.”

I felt the colour shuddering out of my cheeks, and putting baby into the cot I turned on the man and cried: 

“You scoundrel!  The doctor has told me what is the immediate cause of my baby’s illness and your wife has confessed to giving overdoses of a drug at your direction.  If you don’t leave this house in one minute I’ll go straight to the police-station and charge you with poisoning my child.”

The bully in the coward was cowed in a moment.

“Don’t get ’uffy, ma’am,” he said.  “I’m the peaceablest man in the East End, and if I mentioned anything about a friend o’ yourn it slipped out in the ’eat of the moment—­see?”

“Out you go!  Go!  Go!” I cried, and, incredible as it may seem, the man went flying before my face as if I had been a fury.

It would be a long tale to tell of what happened the day following, the next and the next and the next—­how baby became less drowsy, but more restless; how being unable to retain her food she grew thinner and thinner; how I wished to send for the doctor, but dared not do so from fear of his fee; how the little money I had left was barely sufficient to buy the food and stimulants which were necessary to baby’s cure:  how I sat for long hours with my little lamb on my lap straining my dry eyes into her face; and how I cried to God for the life of my child, which was everything I had or wanted.

All this time I was still lodging at the Jew’s, returning to it late every night, and leaving it early in the morning, but nothing happened there that seemed to me of the smallest consequence.  One day Miriam, looking at me with her big black eyes, said: 

“You must take more rest, dear, or you will make yourself ill.”

“No, no, I am not ill,” I answered, and then remembering how necessary my life was to the life of my child, I said, “I must not be ill.”

At last on the Saturday morning—­I know now it must have been Saturday, but time did not count with me then—­I overheard Mrs. Abramovitch pleading for me with her husband, saying they knew I was in trouble and therefore I ought to have more time to find lodging, another week—­three days at all events.  But the stern-natured man with his rigid religion was inexorable.  It was God’s will that I should be punished, and who was he to step in between the All-high and his just retribution?

“The woman is displeasing to God,” he said, and then he declared that, the day being Sabbath (the two tall candlesticks and the Sabbath loaves must have been under his eyes at the moment), he would give me until nine o’clock that night, and if I had not moved out by that time he would put my belongings into the street.