5 Blackboy Passage, Soho. Friday. Dear Mrs. Pottage, I’m rather worried what to do with Letizia while I am looking for work. I wonder if you’d look after her for a week or two? I have a very unpleasant landlady here who hates children, and so I must get a new room until I find an engagement. Don’t ask me to come to Greenwich too, because, dearest Mrs. Pottage, I simply couldn’t. But Letizia’s different, and if you wouldn’t mind having her with you for a little while it would be such a weight off my mind. You must please charge me whatever you think is fair. I haven’t the least idea, so I must leave that to you. I leave here on Monday, and if you will let me know by then what time will suit you I will bring Letizia to Greenwich station, if you’d be kind enough to meet us. I haven’t told Letizia herself that she may be going to stay with you, because I don’t want to disappoint her if you can’t manage it, and of course I will perfectly understand if you can’t. Yours affectionately, Nancy O’Finn. Nancy felt more cheerful when she had posted this letter. Early on Sunday morning the Kinos left Blackboy Passage. “You won’t change your mind at the last minute and let us take the kid?” Mr. Kino asked. Nancy shook her head. “It would be a weight off your shoulders, wouldn’t it?” he pleaded. “Yes, but it would be a terrible weight on my mind,” said Nancy. “Dear Mr. Kino, I couldn’t let her be adopted, I couldn’t really.” Yet when the Kinos had gone, and Nancy was sitting by the window, listening to the church bells and to the occasional footsteps of people clinking along the frozen Sabbath streets and to the emptiness of Soho without the distant roar of traffic, she began to wonder if she ought not to have accepted the Kinos’ offer. She tried to make up her mind to put on her things and take Letizia to the late Mass in the Soho Square church; but the dejection reacted on her energy, and she felt incapable of getting up from her seat, of doing anything except stare out of the window at the grey March sky or look with a listless resentment at Miss Fewkes’s pictures of girls in sunbonnets cuddling donkeys over gates or of girls in furs feeding robins in the snow. She even lacked the energy, when the morning had passed and it was nearly two o’clock, to ring and ask when Miss Fewkes proposed to serve dinner. And when dinner did arrive, with everything cooked so badly as to make it nearly inedible, she did not feel that she could be bothered to protest. “Muvver,” said Letizia, “why has my gravy got spots of soap in it?” “Because it’s getting cold, my dear. So eat it up quickly before it gets any colder.”