"Yes, he's alive all right; I got a separation order from him a couple of years ago. He went off with a woman in the next street, and though he soon tired of her and came back again, I felt I could not live with him any longer; the very sight of him filled me with repulsion and loathing. Father and mother always warned me against him; father told me he saw he wasn't any good; but then, I was only nineteen, and obstinate as girls in love always are, and I wouldn't be said. Poor father! I often wish as I'd listened to him, but I didn't, and I always think it was the death of him when I went home and told him what my married life was. He had been so proud of me doing so well at school and in all the examinations. Just at first we were very happy after our marriage. He earned good money as a commercial traveller in the drapery business; we had a little house in Willesden, and a piano, and an india-rubber plant between the curtains in the parlour, and a girl to help with the housework, and I, like a fool, worshipped the very ground he walked on. Then, after a time, he seemed to change; he came home less and took to going after women as if he were a boy of eighteen instead of a married man getting on for forty. He gave me less and less money for the house, and spent his week-ends at the sea for the good of his health. One very hot summer the children were pale and fretting, and I was just sick for a sight of the sea, but he said he could not afford to take us, not even for a day-trip; afterwards I heard as Mrs. Bates was always with him, there was plenty of money for that. That summer it seemed as if it never would get cool again, and one evening in late September my Martin was taken very queer. I begged my husband not to go away, I felt frightened somehow, but he said as some sea-air was necessary for his health, and that there was nothing the matter with the boy, only my fussing. That night Martin got worse and worse; towards morning a neighbour went for the doctor, but the child throttled and died in my arms before he came. I was all alone. I didn't even know my husband's address, and when I went with the little coffin all alone to the cemetery it seemed as if I left my heart there in the grave with the boy. He was my eldest, and none of the others have been to me what he was. Later on all the girls caught the diphtheria, but they got well again, only Martin was taken. Blake seemed a bit ashamed when he got back; but he left Willesden, some of the neighbours speaking out plain to him about Mrs. Bates, and he not to be found to follow his child's funeral. He tried to make it up with me; but I told him I was going to get a separation order, as I'd taken a sort of repulsion against looking at him since Martin had died alone with me, and the magistrate made an order upon him for eighteen shillings a week--little enough out of the five or six pounds a week he could earn before he took to wine and women and Mrs. Bates. My little