“The factory would be locked for the night.  Won’t they take my word?” she asked.  “I don’t want to be parted from my child while I go to the factory.”

Mr Hutton buttoned his coat.

Mavis made an impassioned appeal to the man in possession and his friend.  She might as well have talked to the stone walls which lined the Dippenham Road for any impression she produced.

“This address will find me up to ten o’clock to-night, mum,” said Mr Hutton, as he threw a soiled envelope on the table.  “An’ if I’m woke up arter, I charge it on the interest.”

When Mr Hutton had taken his leave, Mavis fought an attack of hysterics.  Realising that Gunner, the broker’s man, would prove as good as his word in the matter of having her sick child removed, if the money were not forthcoming, Mavis saw that there was no time to be lost.  She quickly wrote two notes, one of which was to Miss Toombs, the other to Charlie Perigal.  In these she briefly recounted the circumstances of her necessity.  Trivett was dispatched to Miss Toombs, whilst his wife undertook to deliver Perigal’s note at his father’s house.

Mavis waited by her beloved boy’s side while the messengers sped upon their respective errands.  Her child was doubly dear to her now that their separation was threatened.  As his troubled eyes looked helplessly (sometimes it seemed appealingly) into hers, she vowed again and again that he should never be taken away to be nursed by strangers.  Something would happen, something must happen to prevent such a mutilation of her holiest feelings as would be occasioned by her enforced separation from her sick boy.  Of course, why had she not thought of it before?  Her lover, the boy’s father, would return with the messenger, to be reconciled to her over the nursing of the ailing little life back to health and strength.  She had read much the same sort of thing in books, which were always informed with life.

The minutes of the American clock, which had belonged to Miss Nippett, laboriously totalled into an hour.  Mavis could hear Gunner uneasily shuffling in the room below.  The late August evening was drawing in.  Mavis quite succeeded in persuading herself that this would prove the last night of her misfortunes.

Mr Trivett was the first to return.  He brought six pounds from Miss Toombs, with a note saying that it was all she could lay hands upon.  This, with the four which Mavis possessed, made ten.  Gunner smiled amiably and set about collecting his clay pipes, which he had left in odd corners of the cottage.  Then, after half an hour of weary waiting, Mrs Trivett came to the door, which Mavis opened with trembling hands.  She was alone.  Her face proclaimed the fruitlessness of her errand.

“Mr Charles Perigal was out for the evening and would not be back till quite late,” she had been told.

This decided Mavis to act upon a resolve that, had been formulating in her mind while waiting for Mrs Trivett’s return.