mpathies. He listened to all she had to say, beheld
unmoved her miserable tears, and, when she became silent, coolly
delivered his ultimatum. For her he would procure a situation, whereby
she could earn her living, and therewith his relations to her would
end; the child he would put into other hands and have it cared for, but
Lotty would lose sight of it for ever. The girl hesitated, but the
maternal instinct was very strong in her; the little one began to cry,
as if fearing separation from its mother; she decided to refuse.

"Then I shall go on the streets!" she exclaimed passionately. "There's
nothing else left for me."

"You can go where you please," returned Abraham.

She tried to obtain work, of course fruitlessly. She got into debt with
her landlady, and only took the fatal step when at length absolutely
turned adrift.

That was not quite ten years gone by; she was then but eighteen. Let
her have lost her child, and she would speedily have fallen into the
last stages of degradation. But the little one lived. She had called it
Ida, a name chosen from some tale in the penny weeklies, which were the
solace of her misery. She herself took the name of Starr, also from a
page of fiction.

Balancing the good and evil of this life in her dark little mind, Lotty
determined that one thing there was for which it was worth while to
make sacrifices, one end which she felt strong enough to keep
persistently in view. Ida should be brought up "respectably"--it was
her own word; she should be kept absolutely free from the contamination
of her mother's way of living; nay, should, when the time came, go to
school, and have good chances. And at the end of all this was a far-off
hope, a dim vision of possibilities, a vague trust that her daughter
might perchance prove for her a means of returning to that world of
"respectability" from which she was at present so hopelessly shut out.
She would keep making efforts to get into an honest livelihood as often
as an occasion presented itself; and Ida should always live with
"respectable" people, cost what it might.

The last resolution was only adhered to for a few months. Lotty could
not do without her little one, and eventually brought it back to her
own home. It is not an infrequent thing to find little children living
in disorderly houses. In the profession Lotty had chosen there are, as
in all professions, grades and differences. She was by no means a
vicious girl, she had no lov