Miss Pynsent, when she found herself alone, felt she was really quite upside down; for this lurid crisis had never entered into her calculations: the very nature of the case had seemed to preclude it. All she had known or had wished to know was that in one of the dreadful establishments constructed for such purposes her quondam comrade was serving out the sentence that had been substituted for the other (the unspeakable horror) almost when the halter was already round her neck. As there had been no question of _that_ concession’s being stretched any further, poor Florentine had seemed only a little more dead than other people, having no decent tombstone to mark the place where she lay. Miss Pynsent had therefore never thought of her dying again; she had had no idea to what prison she was committed on removal from Newgate (she had wished to keep her mind a blank about the matter in the interest of the child), and it couldn’t occur to her that out of such silence and darkness a second voice would reach her, especially a voice she should really have to listen to. Miss Pynsent would have said, before Mrs. Bowerbank’s visit, that she had no account to render to any one; that she had taken up the child (who might have starved in the gutter) out of charity, and had brought him on, poor and precarious though her own subsistence, without a penny’s help from another source; that the mother had forfeited every right and title; and that this had been understood between them—if anything in so dreadful an hour could have been said to be understood—when she had gone to see her at Newgate (that terrible episode, nine years before, still overshadowed all Miss Pynsent’s other memories): had gone to see her because Florentine had sent for her (a name, face and address coming up out of the still recent but sharply separated past of their working-girl years) as the one friend to whom she could appeal with some chance of a pitying answer. The effect of violent emotion with Miss Pynsent was not to make her sit with idle hands or fidget about to no purpose; under its influence, on the contrary, she threw herself into little jobs as a fugitive takes to by-paths, and clipped and cut and stitched and basted as if to run a race with hysterics. And while her hands, her scissors, her needle flew an infinite succession of fantastic possibilities trotted through her confused little head: she had a furious imagination, and the act of reflexion, in her mind, was always a panorama of figures and scenes. She had had her picture of the future, painted in rather rosy hues, hung up before her now for a good many years; but it struck her that Mrs. Bowerbank’s heavy hand had suddenly punched a hole in the canvas. It must be added, however, that if Amanda’s thoughts were apt to be bewildering visions they sometimes led her to make up her mind, and on this particular September evening she arrived at a momentous decision. What she made up her