Page:A Child of the Jago - Arthur Morrison.djvu/331

 "Go over to Perrott's, quick!" he shouted from the landing below as Poll appeared at her door. "Run, for Gawd's sake, or the woman 'll croak! I'm auf to Father's." And he rushed away to the vicar's lodgings.

Father Sturt emerged at a run, and made for a surgeon's in Shoreditch High Street. And when the surgeon reached Hannah Perrott he found her stretched on her ragged bed, tended, with anxious clumsiness, by Pigeony Poll; while little Em, tearful and abashed, sat in a corner and nibbled a bit of turnip.

Hannah Perrott had anticipated the operation of the Maternity Society letter, and another child of the Jago had come unconsenting into its black inheritance.

Father Sturt met the surgeon as he came away in the later evening, and asked if all were well. The surgeon shrugged his shoulders. "People would call it so," he said. "The boy's alive, and so is the