the gossip of his new friends, and she only won their envy at the cost
of their increased ill-will. They thought she was lording it in London,
and so they were merciless; had they known how poor she was and how ill,
they would have forgotten everything save that she was a Thrummy like
themselves, and there were few but would have shared their all with her.
But she did not believe this, and therefore you may pity her, for the
hour was drawing near, and she knew it, when she must appeal to some one
for her children's sake, not for her own.

No, not for her own. When Tommy was wandering the pretty parts of London
with James Gloag and other boys from Thrums Street in search of Jean
Myles, whom they were to know by her carriage and her silk dress and her
son in blue velvet, his mother was in bed with bronchitis in the
wretched room we know of, or creeping to the dancing school, coughing
all the way.

Some of the fits of coughing were very near being her last, but she
wrestled with her trouble, seeming at times to stifle it, and then for
weeks she managed to go to her work, which was still hers, because
Shovel's old girl did it for her when the bronchitis would not be
defied. Shovel's old slattern gave this service unasked and without
payment; if she was thanked it was ungraciously, but she continued to do
all she could when there was need; she smelled of gin, but she continued
to do all she could.

The wardrobe had been put upon its back on the floor, and so converted
into a bed for Tommy and Elspeth, who were sometimes wakened in the
night by a loud noise, which alarmed them until they learned that it was
only the man in the next room knocking angrily on the wall because their
mother's cough kept him from sleeping.