After a while all was quiet except the feeble cry of a little girl
who had been born. Born in a house of vice, what will became of it
and its child-mother? I such were my thoughts then, and now, after
many years, I can tell the reader what has become of them, of some
of the inmates anyhow.
The woman who kept this house I must, in truth, confess was a
good-hearted person herself, being led astray when quite young, had
never thought of the wrong she was committing by keeping a place of
this sort. She had a widowed mother living in the States and a
family of smaller brothers and sisters who depended mostly on the
ill-gotten money this unfortunate eldest sister would send them for
their support. This _Madam Flora_, then, was very kind in her way to
Martha, and offered to take the baby and bring it up if I was
willing to place it out to nurse with a respectable woman until such
a time that she could take the child herself, as she intended to
give up this life of shame.
Martha was a girl well brought up, had been in school till shortly
before this episode of her life, but it was not her mother who had
been her companion during the last two years.
Her mother who was too much occupied with her smaller children and
other household affairs had thought it better to send her daughter
to a boarding-school to finish her education, and this was the end
of it.
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