And when it was her turn to have the face
Upon her,—all those buzzing pallid lips
Being satisfied with comfort—when he changed
To Marian, saying, ‘And you? You’re going, where?’—
She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone
Which some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,
Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,
And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?
None asked me till this moment. Can I say
Where I go? When it has not seemed worth while
To God himself, who thinks of every one,
To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’
‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lost
Your father and your mother?’
‘Both’ she said,
‘Both lost! My father was burnt up with gin
Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.
My mother sold me to a man last month,
And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.
And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,
As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell
Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)
It seems I shall be lost too, presently,
And so we end, all three of us.’
’Poor child!’
He said,—with such a pity in his voice,
It soothed her more than her own tears,—‘poor child!
’Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s love
