Six Shillings A Week Does Not Keep Body And Soul Together Very Unitedly.
They want to get away from each other when there is only such a very
slight bond as that between them; and one day, I suppose, the pain and
the dull monotony of it all had stood before her eyes plainer than usual,
and the mocking spectre had frightened her.
She had made one last appeal
to friends, but, against the chill wall of their respectability, the
voice of the erring outcast fell unheeded; and then she had gone to see
her child - had held it in her arms and kissed it, in a weary, dull sort
of way, and without betraying any particular emotion of any kind, and had
left it, after putting into its hand a penny box of chocolate she had
bought it, and afterwards, with her last few shillings, had taken a
ticket and come down to Goring.
It seemed that the bitterest thoughts of her life must have centred about
the wooded reaches and the bright green meadows around Goring; but women
strangely hug the knife that stabs them, and, perhaps, amidst the gall,
there may have mingled also sunny memories of sweetest hours, spent upon
those shadowed deeps over which the great trees bend their branches down
so low.
She had wandered about the woods by the river's brink all day, and then,
when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the
waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her
sorrow and her joy.
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