Where they had moved to, I failed to find out, but they had vanished! Fourteen months passed, and one bitterly cold day in February at the end of a long row of prisoners, waiting their turn to appear before the magistrate, stood the woman wretched and ill, with a puling bit of mortality in her arms.
She was a "day charge," having been arrested for stealing a pot of condensed milk.

At length she stood before the magistrate, and the evidence was given that she was seen to take the milk and hurry away.
She was arrested with the milk on her.
It was believed that she had taken milk from the same place at other times.

When asked what she had to say in extenuation, she held her child up and said, "I did not take it for myself, I took it for this!" She did not call it her child.

The magistrate looked, shuddered, and sentenced her to one day.
So once again I stood face to face with her, and face to face with a big man who had been waiting for her, who insolently asked me what I wanted with his wife.

I turned from him to the woman, and asked if she would leave him, for if so I would provide for her.
Mournfully she shook her head; leave him, no!--to the bitter end she stood by him.
So they passed from my view, the educated brute and the despairing, battered, faithful drudge of a woman, to migrate from lodging-house to lodging-house, to suffer and to die! If all the girls of England could see what I have seen, if they could take, as I have taken, some measure of the keen anguish and sorrow that comes from such a step, they would never try the dangerous experiment of marrying a man in the hope of reforming him.