Winner Stories

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and held it fast in both her hands.
Don't hurt him, she said, please don't hurt him.
She looked into the prematurely wrinkled face, into the halfdim
eyes, she held the hand fast with a pressure not of force but of
entreaty. Then they passed on, the bystanders shouting out the
derisive chorus of Come to Jesus! with which London roughs
delight in mocking any passenger whom they suspect of religious
tendencies. In all her sadness, Erica could not help smiling to
herself. That she, an atheist, Luke Raeburn's daughter, should be
hooted at as a follower of Jesus!
In the meantime the woman she had spoken to stood still staring
after her. If an angel had suddenly appeared to her, she could not
have been more startled. A human hand had given her coarse,
guilty, trembling hand such a living pressure as it had never
before received; a pure, loving face had looked at her; a voice,
which was trembling with earnestness and full of the pathos of
restrained tears, had pleaded with her for her own child. The
woman's dormant motherhood sprung into life. Yes, he was her own
child after all. She did not really want to hurt him, but a sort
of demon was inside her, the demon of drink and sometimes it made
her almost mad. She looked down now with lovecleared eyes at the
little crying child who still clung to her ragged skirt. She
stooped and picked him up, and wrapped a bit of her shawl round
him. Presently after a fearful struggle, she turned away from the
publichouse and carried the child home to bed.
The jeering chorus was soon checked, for the shutters were taken
down, and the doors thrown wide, and light, and cheerfulness, and
shelter, and the drink they were all craving for, were temptingly
displayed to draw in the waiting idlers.
But the woman had gone home, and one rather surly looking man still
leaned against the wall looking up the street where Tom and Erica
had disappeared.
Blowed if that ain't a bit of pluck! he said to himself, and
therewith fell into a reverie.
Tom talked of temperance work, about which he was very eager, all
the way to Guilford Terrace. Erica, on reaching home, went at once
to her father's room. She found him propped up with pillows in his
arm chair; he was still only well enough to attempt the lightest of
light literature, and was looking at some old volumes of Punch
which the Osmonds had sent across.
You look tired, Eric! he exclaimed. Was there a good
attendance?
Very, she replied, but so much less brightly than usual that
Raeburn at once divined that something had annoyed her.
Was Mr. Masterman dull?

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