With Harry out of the way, at least for the time being, Georgina could now devote herself to the expansion of her orphanage. There was still a long way to go before she had the fifty children she wanted, but in July 1875 Sarah Palmer, one of the superintendents at 35 Great Coram Street, brought little Katie, ‘such a curious quiet little girl’, to join Rosie, Tommy and Johnnie. The orphanage continued to grow in the months that followed, though many of the children were less promising than Georgina might have hoped: ‘They are all forsaken children without a friend or a relation in the world. Most of them I have taken in undersized, wretched, without a change of rags, with loathsome diseases, with underbred, vicious natures, and often repulsive.’ An ‘enormous’ baby with a bad cold and cough arrived in November. Georgina named him Freddie after her two old friends Fred Clay and Freddy Warre. Three weeks later, he was joined by Janie, a ‘pretty fair little spoilt, half-starved wretch. Vulgar in the extreme.’ After a few months Janie was given the new name of Beryl.

At the end of 1875 Georgina looked back on the previous twelve months as usual. She had been laid up for several weeks with a sprained ankle, barely able to hobble from one room to another. Harry had come to the house on a few occasions to collect his belongings, but he had never stayed for long. Georgina wondered what he was doing on New Year's Eve, still confidently expecting that he would eventually come back to her:

In the middle of the following April, the Rawlings boys showed Georgina a newspaper article that they thought would interest her.