The reader sees Betty Higden solicitously holding her grandson in her lap (left) as Bella Wilfer peers through the open door (right) and smoke from the fitful fire fills the cavernous fireplace. Stone does not dwell on the quaintness of Betty's scant furniture or bric-a-brac on the mantel, finding little romance in poverty but conveying through the sturdiness and pleasing shape of the chairs Betty's essential dignity. The moment the illustrator has chosen to realise is thus a brief passage in Part 8 (the monthly number for December 1864): “they raised the latch of Betty Higden's door, and saw her sitting in the dimmest and furthest corner with poor Johnny in her lap” (283). The physical distance between the well-dressed, upper-middle-class visitors at the door and the working class Betty in her chair is a gulf that ultimately consumes the young life upon which the Boffins have laid such hope. When the child they have adopted came down with some childhood ailment caught from "the Minders," Betty had apparently taken the child to the "doctor's shop once" (281), by which we should probably understand the local apothecary's, but, distrustful of institutions, has elected to wait and see whether "Our Johnny would work round" (281), rather than take him to a proper medical establishment.

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