"Do your pains come often?" asked Jeremy.

"Yes. They're very bad."

"I have them, too," said Jeremy. "It's generally, I expect, because
I eat too much--at least, the Jampot used to say so. They're in my
head sometimes, too. And then I'm really sick. Do you feel sick?"

Miss Jones began to pull herself together. She wiped her eyes and
patted her hair.

"It's my neuralgia," she said again. "It's from my eyes partly, I
expect."

"It's better to be sick," continued Jeremy, "if you can be--"

She flung him then a desperate look, as though she were really an
animal at bay.

"You see, I can't go away," she said. "I've nowhere to go to. I've
no friends, nor relations, and no one will take me for their
children, if Mrs. Cole says I can't keep order."

"Then I suppose you'd go to the workhouse," continued Jeremy,
pursuing her case with excited interest. "That's what the Jampot
always used to say, that one day she'd end in the workhouse; and
that's a horrible place, SHE said, where there was nothing but
porridge to eat, and sometimes they took all your clothes off and
scrubbed your back with that hard yellow soap they wash Hamlet