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