[A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett]@TWC D-Link bookA Lady of Quality CHAPTER XXI--An heir is born 3/13
In dark kennels, where thieves hid and vagrants huddled, she carried her beauty and her stateliness, the which when they shone on the poor rogues and victims housed there seemed like the beams of the warm and golden sun. Once in a filthy hovel in a black alley she came upon a poor girl dying of a loathsome ill, and as she stood by her bed of rags she heard in her delirium the uttering of one man's name again and again, and when she questioned those about she found that the sufferer had been a little country wench enticed to town by this man for a plaything, and in a few weeks cast off to give birth to a child in the almshouse, and then go down to the depths of vice in the kennel. "What is the name she says ?" her Grace asked the hag nearest to her, and least maudlin with liquor.
"I would be sure I heard it aright." "'Tis the name of a gentleman, your ladyship may be sure," the beldam answered; "'tis always the name of a gentleman.
And this is one I know well, for I have heard more than one poor soul mumbling it and raving at him in her last hours.
One there was, and I knew her, a pretty rosy thing in her country days, not sixteen, and distraught with love for him, and lay in the street by his door praying him to take her back when he threw her off, until the watch drove her away.
And she was so mad with love and grief she killed her girl child when 'twas born i' the kennel, sobbing and crying that it should not live to be like her and bear others.
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