The child of shame! Margaret drew back. She was not prepared for this. Neither was she prepared, when the test came, to take into her home and her life a little waif upon whom this blight had fallen,—so little do we know ourselves.

The girl, her understanding quickened by her anguish of mind, saw the gesture and interpreted it aright.

"You cast him off!" she cried. "Oh, I knew you would. That is why I told you falsely. I did not mean to tell you the truth—ever. But, oh, madam, when you said that she, this lady, would make him honorable as his father had been—would keep him pure as his mother was pure, and true, as both had proved—I felt that it was a curse I had drawn down upon his helpless head. Then, oh, then, I could not keep back the truth. His father was not honorable nor his mother pure."

"Rosalie," said Margaret, calming the girl with the quiet womanliness of her manner, "do you want to tell me your story? Is it this that you have brought me back to hear?"

"Yes. Oh, yes! Let me tell it before you judge me. It is for the boy's sake that I lied; it is for his sake that I will speak the truth now. Oh, it is the truth that I will tell you now!"

"Go on," said Margaret.

"Eight years ago," the sick girl said mournfully, "only eight years, I was little Rosalie Lesseur Beaumont. We were French enough to have the names, though we had always lived in Maryland. My home was in the country. I knew nothing about the city and its wickedness. I was but a child when I met—" she looked up appealingly—"I need not tell you his name?"

"No," said Margaret, hastily, "there is no need that I should know."

The sick girl threw her a quick glance of gratitude. It is a thing most passing strange that when a woman finds herself betrayed, disgraced, branded with shame and thrust out into that utter darkness from which she knows there can never be recall—even then she holds inviolate the name of him who has brought her low.

"I think if I had had a mother to tell me things it might have been different, but I had lived most of my life with my father, a proud, cold man who loved me, perhaps, but did not let me know it, though he robbed himself of the very necessaries of life that he might educate me. I was to be a teacher. That was his ambition and mine. There was no confidence between us. I could not get close to him as a child does to its mother.... I met this man when I was off at school. He was so different from the country boys I had known. He had a way of looking in my eyes and saying things that took my simple, silly heart by storm. I do not offer it in excuse, but madam—I loved him as I had never loved my God! I trusted him as though he were my God. And when he told me that he loved me and wanted me to be his wife, I believed him. He could not marry me openly just now, he said, but if I would go with him to Washington we would be married secretly that very day. I was an honest girl, though a very foolish one, and I insisted on that.... I trusted him to my undoing. There was a form of marriage. A young man came to our room and murmured something as we stood before him. He did not look like a minister, but I was so dazed and frightened at what I had done that I hardly thought of it then.... Madam, we were never married. My husband, for so I believed him, told me so one day in a fit of anger—told me brutally."

Margaret gripped the iron rail of the bed.

"That day I took the last cent of money I had and went back to my father's house. It had been a bitter grief to him that I had brought his gray hairs to shame. He shut his door upon me. Oh, madam!... I begged my way then back to Washington and the man who had betrayed me, and begged him to take me in. What else could I do?... I lived with him in open sin until he came to me one day and told me that it was all over. He was to be married the next day. He had delayed telling me because he hated to have a scene, but he had decided now to settle down and live a correct life.

"'And I!' I cried, standing up before him, 'what am I to do—I and your child—while you are leading a "correct" life?' He shrugged his shoulders. He would give me money. That was all he could do. Certainly it was as much as I could expect. He had not asked me to come back to him.

"Oh, madam, I was wild!—was wild! I had nowhere to go to hide my shame. My father's house was closed to me—my mother dead. In all the world I had no friend. It was my fault, my grievous fault. I know that well, and then I have been told it often since,—if I had been a modest girl and staid at home and turned away from all his tales of love and all his promises, this never would have come to me, they've said.... Oh, I have told myself that many times with bitterest tears!... But, lady, even though she knows it is her fault, her sin, that has brought her to this plight—still, still, 'tis hard for a poor girl to feel her pains upon her and know she has no friends!"

Margaret took the woman's thin, trembling hand between her two strong ones and held it close.

"It is hard," she said with infinite gentleness, "hard and very pitiful. The world is full of hard things for women."

The sick girl looked up with a startled expression. "Surely, sin with its sorrows has not touched you?"

"My poor girl, the sorrows that come from sin do not stop with the sinning. But go on with your story," said Margaret.

"Oh, yes. I was telling you why I was so desperate that day; I thought you would not understand. I think a madness was in my blood. You see, it was very hard, and I was so young I could not see the justice of it. I had been his toy—his plaything—and now, broken and useless, he cast me into the mire of the street, while he—and lady, my sin had been his sin too—to-morrow he would marry a pure girl, such as I had been, and the world would look on and wish him joy and think it right....

"He had not told me where the marriage was to be, nor who the girl was. But the next morning I went to his home and waited in a place near by for him to come out. I did not mean to speak to him again—only to follow him. For hours I waited. I was faint from lack of food, but I was afraid to leave the spot for fear of missing him. At last a gentleman came out and drove off, and then the man I loved and hated. A carriage was waiting and he was driven away. I ran after it. I would have hired a cab only I had no money. I could not run so very fast, you know, and sometimes I almost stumbled and fell—then caught myself and hurried on. And though it gained on me I kept my eye on the carriage. At Sixteenth street it turned south toward the Square, and then I knew it was going to St. John's."

"St. John's!"

"Yes. You know the place? It is near Lafayette Square—the old church with the columns in front. When I got there, out of breath and almost dead from running, a crowd was on the sidewalk and even out into the street waiting for the bridal party to come out. They would have crowded around the very door but that policemen kept them back. I elbowed my way through them and was so desperate and violent that they made way for me, thinking I was some crazy woman—as indeed I almost think myself I was.

"As I reached the door a policeman caught me by the arm, but I jerked away and cried. 'I will go in! He is my husband—mine!' And then I beat upon the door before they could stop me and screamed again, 'He is my husband!' At that they overpowered me and dragged me off—somewhere—I don't know—to the station, I believe. That night my baby was born."

"How old is your child?" asked Margaret, her voice so strained and hard that the sick woman looked up surprised.

"Six years. Have I tired you with my story? I did not mean to be so long."

"Go on. It interests me deeply," answered Margaret, with irony unnoticed by the sick woman. "I am learning that we all are bound up in one another's woes—and wickedness." After a moment she asked with a tinge of bitterness, "And was no voice lifted to save this girl?"

"I cannot tell. I never saw her—do not know her name or where she lived. But this I know; that in time he would be false to her as he was false to me. It was not in him to be—"

"Let us not talk of him," said Margaret, hastily. "Tell me about yourself? How did you live?"

"Oh, madam, ask me anything but that! 'Twould break my heart to tell that tale and yours to hear it. How can a poor girl live who has a baby in her arms and not a friend?... I went from door to door asking for work. It was the same old story everywhere I went. They looked at me—a girl of seventeen—and at the child—and then they shook their heads and closed the door.

"One day when I was desperate I got a piece of crepe and put it on my hat and lied. I said my husband had been killed, and would they give a poor girl work? The child was good—he seldom cried, I told them—and I would work at night and have no afternoon off to make up for his being there. If only they would try me! Then they asked me questions—what was my husband's name? Where was he killed? and how?—simple, natural questions, all of them, I know now, but then they seemed traps to catch me, and I grew confused and tripped myself, and then—they shook their heads, just as before, and shut the door."

"Did you never try anything but housework?"

"Oh, yes, I tried the others first. They would not have me in the stores. They found out. Somehow I could not help their finding out. I don't know how they did it, but they did. There was always somebody to tell."

"And could you get no sewing to do?"

"I had never been taught to sew. I had been in school until I met him. It was the plan always that I should be a teacher. Of course I could not even think of that—afterwards."

Margaret's lips tightened.

"Why did you not go to him, this man," she cried with sudden vehemence, "and demand support for your child?"

"I did at last. In my fierce anger that day I had said I never would—that I would starve in the streets before I would take a penny from his hands.... But, madam, then I did not know how hard 'twould be to starve with a baby at your breast,—a helpless baby growing thinner day by day for lack of mother's milk that had dried up because she had no food! It is not so hard—this starving—for one's self, when you get used to the crusts and refuse from the market; but when your child, your baby, fades away, and has not strength to cry, and gets that pitiful, pinched look, and you realize that it too is starving—oh, madam, then your pride is gone!... I went to him and begged food for his child. He gave me money for awhile, and then he went away."

"Went away and left you helpless," breathed Margaret.

"He left me desperate! 'Twas then I had my hardest fight. Oh, madam, I sometimes wonder if good women know—the sheltered, favored ones who will not have us in their homes after our one false step, how hard it is then for us to keep from going down. They surely cannot know!—how we are tempted by our poverty and want of work.... You see there are so many pitfalls for our feet! Oh, there are hands held out!—the hands that drag us down! And doors that open—but they are the gates of hell!"

She sank back exhausted. But after a moment she went on:

"Madam, I was often hungry in those days,—was oftener cold,—and sometimes had not where to lay my head; but I swear to you I kept myself from evil for my child, and I kept my child. Then one day a fever fell upon me, and some ladies came and took my baby to the Children's Home and me to the hospital. It was typhoid fever, caused by unsanitary food the doctor said (you see when one is starving she cannot stop to ask if this or that is sanitary, so long as it is food), and for many weeks I lay delirious.

"I was just ready to be discharged from the hospital when one day I read in the paper that this man had come back to Washington. I laid the paper down and thought long and hard. I knew that he was wealthy—had money that he could not use, 'twas said. I determined to go to him and ask him once for all to settle on me or his child a sum sufficient to support us in a humble way—oh, a very humble way—only so that I could have my baby with me and be sure of bread. You do not think that was too much to ask?"

"No! no!"

"I went straight to him from the hospital. I think—perhaps—I was not quite myself, though I seemed well. The doctor here tells me (I have asked him since) that often typhoid leaves a patient for months in a bewildered state of mind—'confusional insanity' I think they call it—and—I do not know—but I have thought that—perhaps—perhaps it was—"

Her eyes were fixed on vacancy, a wistful troubled look in them, as if, forgetful of her auditor, she were laboring upon some unsolved problem.

"You found him in?" asked Margaret, gently recalling her.

"Oh, yes—yes. I found him in. He was sitting at his desk—"

She stopped abruptly. Margaret was leaning forward, one hand clutching the rail of the iron bed, the other clenched in her lap.

"Go on," she said hoarsely.

The sick woman looked at her and a swift change passed over her face, a look almost of veiled cunning coming into it.

"He would do nothing for me," she resumed in a commonplace voice. "I never saw him again—he died soon afterwards, I heard." The subject seemed finished.

"Just one thing more," Margaret's lips were dry. She hardly knew her own voice. "Did—did he die a natural death or by violence?"

For just a moment the woman hesitated. It was as if she were weighing her words. Then she said quietly, "He died a natural death."

Margaret drew a long, long breath.

"Tell me something about your little boy," she said almost lightly.

A tenderness came into the woman's wan face at mention of him.

"I named him Louis—Louis Lesseur. That was my mother's name, and Louis is for my little brother that died. I could not give him even my own name—my father was so bitter—but these two were dead."

"And is he very dear to you—your little son?"

"Dear? O, madam, he is the very breath of life to me."

"And yet you cannot have him with you?"

"No." She said it very patiently. "The rules of both Hospital and Home forbid. But sometimes they bring him to me for a little while."

As the sad story to which she had listened had progressed, a determination had been taking form in Margaret De Jarnette's mind.

She bent over now and speaking slowly that the sick woman might take in her words, said,

"And would it make you very happy if you could have him all the time? If you could lie upon a couch in some pleasant, sunny room—a quiet house, we'll say, where you would not be disturbed—could have your little Louis in this room with you every day—to talk to you and lean against you as he talks—to have his playthings on the floor and play that you and he were this and that—perhaps sometimes when you were very well even to have his crib bed in your room, and tuck him in, and watch him go to sleep—could have his goodnight kiss and hear him say his prayers—" she drew the picture with the swift, sure strokes that mothers know—"if you could have all this and know that it would last until some night you'd fall asleep to waken on your mother's breast,—would it make you very happy?"

The woman looked at her with parted lips and shining eyes.

"Oh, madam!—It would be heaven!"

"Then enter into paradise," Margaret said softly.

"You mean—" the sick girl asked, incredulously.

"I mean that I am going to take you to my home if you will go, and let you have your little Louis with you there."

The woman caught her hand and kissed it passionately. Then with quick alarm she asked, "But madam—the lady? Would she be willing for him to come to me?"

Margaret smiled. "She will be willing."

Another fear assailed the mother.

"Perhaps she will not want to take him when she knows his mother's sin."

"She will hold him all the more tenderly because of what his mother has suffered."

"Ah! is she then so good? so kind?"

"She is not very good," said Margaret, smiling down at her, "but to your boy she promises she will never be anything but kind. My poor girl, will you trust her?"

A sudden light broke upon the sick woman.

"You?" she cried. "You?—who heard it all, and took my hand—and understood? You?"

A look of awe and then of peace ineffable stole over her face.

"Oh, madam! now I know God has forgiven me!"