Again and again when I looked at it in my darkest hours I had found new
strength and courage. It had been like a shrine to me--what the image of
the Virgin was in happier days--and thinking of all that my darling
mother had done and suffered and sacrificed for my sake when I was
myself a child, I felt that I could never part with her picture under
the pressure of any necessity whatever.
"Never," I thought, "never under any circumstances."
It must have been about a week after this that I went to Ilford on one
of those chill, clammy nights which seem peculiar to the East End of
London, where the atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog and thin
drizzling rain; penetrates to the bone and hangs on one's shoulders like
a shroud.
Thinking of this, as I thought of everything, in relation to baby, I
bought, as I was passing a hosier's shop, a pair of nice warm stockings
and a little woollen jacket.
When I reached the Olivers' I found, to my surprise, two strange men
stretched out at large in the kitchen, one on the sofa and the other in
the rocking-chair, both smoking strong tobacco and baby coughing
constantly.
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