had gone to a corner cupboard with perforated tins of diamond pattern
in its doors, and taken therefrom a soup-plate and cup and saucer.
Paying no attention to his mother's reference to a delayed meal, he
ladled out of the big saucepan, with a cracked cup, a plate of the
steaming soup, and carried it carefully to an oilcloth-covered table,
on which was a lamp and glass pitcher, some unwashed dishes left from
the last meal, a broken doll, and a child's shoe. Putting down the
plate of soup, he came back to the stove and poured out a cup of
feeble-looking coffee.

"Goin' to be extras out to-night and I mightn't get back till after
ten." Again his gay little smile lighted his thin face. "Ifen I
don't eat 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.