. . . In a dark street she met and spoke to me, Importuning, one wet and mild March night. We walked and talked together. O her tale Was very common; thousands know it all! Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming; Parents that railed; London; the child born dead; A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls “Taken on” a few months at a dressmaker’s In the crush of the “season;” thirteen shillings a week! The fashionable people’s dresses done, And they flown off, these fifty extra girls Sent—to the streets: that is, to work that gives Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes Respectable employers all demand Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know! And she—“_Why_, _I have gone on down and down_, _And there’s the gutter_, _look_, _that I shall die in_!” “My dear,” I say, “where hope of all but that Is gone, ’tis time, I think, life were gone too.” She looks at me. “_That I should kill myself_?”— “That you should kill yourself.”—“_That would be sin_, _And God would punish me_!”—“And will not God Punish for this?” She pauses: then whispers: “_No_, _no_, _He will forgive me_, _for He knows_!” I laughed aloud: “_And you_,” she said, “_and you_, _Who are so good_, _so noble_” . . . “Noble? Good?” I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat. O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep Of this vast flock that perishes alone Out in the pitiless desert!—Yet she’d speak: She’d ask me: she’d entreat: she’d demonstrate. O I must not say that! I must believe! Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky So big and blue and pure above it all? O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep, Entreat no more and demonstrate no more; For I believe there _is_ a God, a God Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no, But in the heart of man, on the dear lips Of angel women, of heroic men! O hopeless wanderer that would not stay, (“_It is too late_, _I cannot rise again_!”) O saint of faith in love behind the veils, (“_You must believe in God_, _for you are good_!”), O sister who made holy with your kiss, Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March There in the hideous infamous London streets My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place, O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep! THE NEW LOCKSLEY HALL. “FORTY YEARS AFTER.”