t now I mightn't eat at all. Have one?"

He poked a plate of the health-destroying biscuits at Bettina with a
merry little movement, and bravely she took one, bravely made effort
to eat it. "What's your name?" I heard him ask her, and then I
turned to Mrs. Gibbons.

"It is about your little boy I've come to see you." I moved my chair
as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat. "He is
too young to be at work. He isn't twelve, is he?"

The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy's bondage to a bench
from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of
an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing. With helplessness
and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an
excellent example of both. Still--"He isn't twelve yet, is he?" I
repeated.

Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the
bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the
other. For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.

"No 'm, he ain't but eleven, but I had to tell the mayor that signed
the papers permitting of him to work, that he was twelve. The law
don't let children work lessen they're twelve, and only then if their
mother is a widow and 'ain't got nothing and nobody to do for her. I
don't like to tell a story if I can help it, and them what don't know
nothing 'bout how things is can't understand, and say we oughtn't to
do it. They'd do it, too, ifen they had to. After his father died I
had to take Jimmy out of school and put him to work. There wasn't
nothing else to do."

"Has his father been dead long?" I moved still further from the
stove. My question was unthinking. He couldn't have been dead long.

"In days and months it 'ain't been so long, but it's been awful long
to me. 'Taint been more'n a year since they brought him home to me
dead, and I been plum' no 'count ever since. This baby," she put the
child in her arms on her lap and shook her knees in mechanical effort
to still its cries, "this baby was born while its father was being
buried, and when I took in my man was gone and wouldn't never come
home no more, never give me his wages on Saturday nights, and
wouldn't be here to do nothing for me and the children, seems like
something inside me just give out. I reckon you 'ain't never had
nothing to happen to you like that, have you?"

"No, I've never had anything like that to happen to me." The last
remna