"It's not that," she said. "It's not him. It's my baby. I couldn't abear she should be born in the Workhouse along of them."
To Mrs. Trupp the Workhouse system had been a nightmare ever since, as a young girl, she had first realized its existence and become dimly aware of the part it played in our imperial scheme. She believed that the institution which had its local seat in the old Cavalry Barracks at the back of Rectory Walk was no worse than others of its kind up and down the country. Sometimes she visited its wards and nurseries with her old friend, Edward Caspar, and came away sick at heart and oppressed of spirit. More often, sitting in her garden, she listened to his quietly told stories of what he always called "our Cess-pool."
Mrs. Trupp stroked Ruth's hand.
"It shan't," she said, with the fierceness that sometimes surprised her friends. "You must trust us. Mr. Trupp'll see you through. But you must leave the Hotel at once. I'm going to send you to a house of mine in Sea-gate—now. I shall telephone for the car."
And half an hour later Ruth was sitting in the chocolate-bodied car that once before had carried her into the perilous Unknown.
CHAPTER LI
EVELYN TRUPP
Evelyn Moray had been brought up in the Church; and, like most Englishwomen of her class and generation, she had as a girl looked to the Church to enable her to realize her ideals.
In her young days she and her neighbour of later life, Edward Caspar, had been of the little group of West-end people who had been drawn East by the couple who were making St. Jude's, Whitechapel, the home of real religion for more than the dwellers in the East-end. She would sometimes give a violin solo at the famous Worship Hour in the church off Commercial Street; while Edward Caspar would on rare occasions read Browning or Wordsworth there. The memory of those early days of dawning hopes served as a never-present bond between the pair when in later years chance caused them to pass their lives side by side in the little town on the hill under Beau-nez. And the religious development of each had followed much the same lines.
They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of the late seventies and the early eighties, and ...