"Three pounds a week for life," he read, with profound reverence. "If
you ain't a blinkin' marvel." He complimented her, giving her the paper
back. Then he realised that, through him, her gains were lost.
"Gawd, I done wrong. I got no right to mess up a thing like that. I
didn't know. See, I'll tell him I made you lie. I'll own the baby's
mine."
"But there ain't no baby," she persisted.
"There's plenty of babies looking for a mother with three pounds a
week," he said.
She tore the paper up. "Then they'll not find me," she said. "Three
pounds a week's gone. And your letters of gold, Mr. Martlow, remain."
The practised voice of Sir William Rumbold, speaking on the platform,
filled the ante-room, not with the rhetorician's counterfeit of
sincerity, but, unmistakably, with sincerity itself. "I had prepared a
speech," he was saying. "A prepared speech is useless in face of the
emotion I feel at the life of Timothy Martlow. I say advisedly to you
that when I think of Martlow, I know myself for a worm. He was despised
and rejected. What had England done for him that he should give his
life for her? We wronged him.
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