Sheila paused in her talk but not in the work which she had just started.
“Not much of a room, this one, neither,” she remarked, casting her eye on the bed, but not missing a stitch in her sewing as she spoke. “Four shillin’s I pay for it a week and it’s supposed to hold two people. Outside the door you can see that ticketed up, ‘To hold two adults,’ like the price marked on a pair of secondhand trousers. I’m all alone here; only the woman, old Meg, that stops in the room behind this one, passes through here on her way to work. But ye’ll stay here with me now, two Frosses people in the one room, so to speak.”
“What kind of work are ye doin’ here?” asked Norah, pointing to the cloth which Sheila was sewing.
“Shirt-finishin’,” Sheila replied. “For every shirt there’s two rows of feather-stitchin’, eight buttonholes and seven buttons sewed on, four seams and eight fasteners. It takes me over an hour to do each shirt and the pay is a penny farthing. I can make about fifteen pence a day, but out of that I have to buy my own thread. But ye’ll be tired, child, listenin’ to me clatterin’ here all night.”
“I’m not tired listenin’ to ye at all, but it’s sorrow that’s with me because life was so hard on ye,” said Norah. “Everything was black again’ ye.”
“One gets used to it all,” said Sheila with the air of resignation which sits on the shoulders of those to whom the keys of that delicious mystery known as happiness are forever lost. “One gets used to things, no matter how hard they be, and one doesn’t like to die.”
But now Norah listened almost heedlessly. Thoughts dropped into her mind and vanished with the frightful rapidity of things falling into empty space; and memories of still more remote things, faint, far away and almost undefined, were wafted against her soul.
The girl fell into a heavy slumber.
II
IN the morning she awoke to find herself lying in bed, the blankets on which the blue letters STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT were stamped wrapped tightly around her, and Sheila Carrol lying by her side. For a moment she wondered vaguely how she had got into the bunk, then raising herself on her elbow, she looked round the room.