ultimatum. For her he would procure a situation, whereby she could
earn her living, and therewith his relations to her would end; the
child he would put into other hands and have it cared for, but Lotty
would lose sight of it for ever. The girl hesitated, but the
maternal instinct was very strong in her; the little one began to
cry, as if fearing separation from its mother; she decided to
refuse.

"Then I shall go on the streets!" she exclaimed passionately.
"There's nothing else left for me."

"You can go where you please," returned Abraham.

She tried to obtain work, of course fruitlessly. She got into debt
with her landlady, and only took the fatal step when at length
absolutely turned adrift.

That was not quite ten years gone by; she was then but eighteen. Let
her have lost her child, and she would speedily have fallen into the
last stages of degradation. But the little one lived. She had called
it Ida, a name chosen from some tale in the penny weeklies, which
were the solace of her misery. She herself took the name of Starr,
also from a page of fiction.

Balancing the good and evil of this life in her dark little mind,
Lotty determined that one thing there was for which it was worth
while to make sacrifices, one end which she felt strong enough to
keep persistently in view. Ida should be brought up "respectably"--
it was her own word; she should be kept absolutely free from the
contamination of her mother's way of living; nay, should, when the