"She is downstairs. So quiet, and peaceful, and happy she looks."

"Could she speak! Oh, if God--if I might but have heard her little
voice! Mother, I used to dream of it. May I see her once again? Oh,
mother, if I strive very hard and God is very merciful, and I go to
heaven, I shall not know her--I shall not know my own again: she will
shun me as a stranger, and chug to Susan Palmer and to you. Oh, woe! Oh,
woe!" She shook with exceeding sorrow.

In her earnestness of speech she had uncovered her face, and tried to
read Mrs. Leigh's thoughts through her looks. And when she saw those
aged eyes brimming full of tears, and marked the quivering lips, she
threw her arms round the faithful mother's neck, and wept there, as she
had done in many a childish sorrow, but with a deeper, a more wretched
grief.

Her mother hushed her on her breast; and lulled her as if she were a
baby; and she grew still and quiet.

They sat thus for a long, long time. At last, Susan Palmer came up with
some tea and bread and butter for Mrs. Leigh. She watched the mother
feed her sick, unwilling child, with every fond inducement to eat which
she could devise; they neither of them took notice of Susan's presence.
That night they lay in each other's arms; but Susan slept on the ground
beside them.

They took the little corpse (the little unconscious sacrifice, whose
early calling-home had reclaimed her poor wandering mother) to the hills,
which in her lifetime she had never seen. They dared not lay her by the
stern grandfather in Milne Row churchyard, but they bore her to a lone