eek's time we would come again she
would give her up to us, and as for herself, she would think of it, and
perhaps she also would give up the life; she hated it, she said.

There was another girl there, a fair, quiet girl of fifteen. She was ill
and very suffering, and we tried for her too; but there seemed no hope.
"Take the little one; you are not too late for her," the mother said,
and we went with the promise, "One more week and she is yours."

The week passed, and every day we prayed for that little one. Then when
the time came, we went. Hope and fear alternated within us. One felt
sick with dread lest anything had happened to break the mother's word,
and yet one hoped. The house door was open. The people in the street
smiled as we stopped our bandy, got out, and went in. I remembered their
smiles afterwards, and understood. The mother was there: in a corner,
crouching in pain, was the girl; on the floor asleep, _drugged_, lay the
child with her little arms stretched out. The mother's eyes were hard.

It was no use. Outside in the street the people sat on their verandahs
and laughed. "Offer twenty thousand rupees, and see if her mother will
give her to you!" shouted one. Inside we sat beside that mother, not
knowing what to say.

The child stirred in her sleep, and turned. "Will you go?" said the
mother very roughly in her ear. She opened listless, senseless eyes. She
had no wish to go. "She wanted to come last week," we said. The mother
hardened, and pushed the child, and rolled her over with her foot. "_She
will not go now_," she said.

Oh, it did seem pitiful! One of those pitiful, pitiful things which
never grow less pitiful because they are common everywhere. That
_little_ girl, and this!

We took the mother's hands in ours, and pleaded once again. And then
words failed us. They sometimes do. There are things that stifle words.

At last they asked us to go. The girl in the corner would not
speak--could not, perhaps she only moaned; we passed her and went out.
The mother followed us, half sorry for us,--there is something of the
woman left in her,--half sullen, with a lowering sullenness. "You will
never see her again," she said, and she named the town, one of the
Sodoms of this Province, to which the child was soon to be sent; and
then, just a little ashamed of her broken promise, she added, "I would
have let her go, but _he_ would not, no, never; and she does not belong
to me now, so what could I do?"