‘Go away, Alice!’ shouted Milli, seeing her sister, and she turned and began to hasten away.

But Milli was large with her child so Alice, despite her clothing, soon caught her up.

‘What are you doing? Are you leaving again? Is that it? You would leave me—’

‘Do not try to stop me, Alice, for I have made up my mind.’

Alice tried to think. She did not know how to stop her sister leaving her again.

‘But you have no plan. You have no place to go, you said so—’

‘And perhaps I have made a plan, Alice. Perhaps I have found a place.’

Alice was confounded by these words. There was no comfort in them. She saw, finally, that in Milli’s other hand she held a brick. An old broken brick probably manufactured at the brick-works right here and fallen from some wretched hovel in this very suburb. But why would you carry a brick?

‘What if Father McCreadie saw you now?’ said Alice, though she hardly knew what she meant by this.

And Milli laughed, an ugly laugh, a laugh that was entirely at home in Crown Street and among the people who inhabited it. ‘What do I care if Father McCreadie sees me? I want him to see! Priests and nuns—what do they know? They do not live in our world, yet they tell us how to live our lives!’

Alice had no reply, for what reply was there in the face of such an undeniable truth?

‘What if Mum saw you?’ she said finally.

‘Mum is dead these five years,’ said Milli, strangely flat and listless now, as though this fact no longer conveyed much to her, and the fire that had flared briefly in her seemed extinguished. She did not look at her sister or at the street on which they stood; her gaze was turned towards the smoking rooftops and beyond, to the spires of the distant university. If she would only look at Alice now, if she would only meet her sister’s gaze and reveal her soul, she might be saved. But Milli did not look. She did not reveal her soul. Instead, she started forward, sudden purpose in her step. A police constable was approaching on the other side of the street.

Alice watched with a helplessness and an inevitability that the poverty of her youth had instilled in her as Milli dived across the street, all but falling beneath the hooves of a startled ironmonger’s horse, and hurled her brick at the plate-glass window of an unfortunate butcher.

The astonished constable did not react at once, seeming unprepared for a hugely pregnant female to arrive at his feet and hurl a brick through a shop window. But he recovered himself and seized her. And Milli did not attempt to flee nor to resist arrest but submitted quietly enough to the cell that awaited her.

Instead it was her sister, Alice, who cried and wrung her hands.