Five years before her marriage to the Cheap Jack, she was a chambermaid in a small hotel in London, and “under notice to leave.” Why—she did not deem it necessary to tell George. In this hotel Jan was born, and Jan’s mother died. She was a foreigner, it was supposed, and her husband also, for they talked a foreign language to each other. He was not with her when she first came, but he joined her afterwards, and was with her at her death. So far the Cheap Jack’s wife spoke upon hearsay. Though employed at the hotel, which was very full, she was not sleeping in the house; she was not on good terms with the landlady, nor even with the other servants, and her first real connection with the matter was when the gentleman, overhearing some “words” between her and the landlady at the bar, abruptly asked her if she were in want of employment. He employed her,—to take the child to the very town where she was now living as the Cheap Jack’s wife. He did not come with her, as he had to attend his wife’s funeral. It was understood at the hotel that he was going to take the body abroad for interment. So the porter had said. The person to whom she was directed to bring the child was a respectable old woman, living in the outskirts of the town, whose business was sick-nursing. She seemed, however, to be comfortably off, and had not been out for some time. She had been nurse to the gentleman in his childhood, so she once told the Cheap Jack’s wife with tears. But she was always shedding tears, either over the baby, or as she sat over her big Bible, “for ever having to wipe her spectacles, and tears running over her nose ridic’lus to behold.” She was pious, and read the Bible aloud in the evening. Then she had fainting fits; she could not go uphill or upstairs without great difficulty, and she had one of her fits when she first saw the child. If with these infirmities of body and mind the ex-nurse had been easily managed, the Cheap Jack’s wife professed that she could have borne it with patience. But the old woman was painfully shrewd, and there was no hoodwinking her. She never allowed the Cheap Jack’s wife to go out without her, and contrived, in spite of a hundred plans and excuses, to prevent her from speaking to any of the townspeople alone. Never, said Sal, never could she have put up with it, even for the short time before the gentleman came down to them, but for knowing it would be a paying job. But his arrival was the signal for another catastrophe, which ended in Jan’s becoming a child of the mill.