'If there's anybody there,' she murmured, staring out into the
consuming darkness that had absorbed every colour, every form,
except the looming outline of God's Little Mountain against a watery
moon-rise--'if there's anybody there, I'd be obleeged if you'd give
an eye to our Foxy, as is lonesome in tub. It dunna matter about me,
being under Ed'ard's roof.'

Hazel had never felt so like a child in its mother's lap. Her own
mother had not made her feel so. She had been a vague, abstracted woman
with an air of bepuzzlement and lostness. She looked so long out of the
door--never shut, except when Abel insisted on it--that there was no
time for Hazel. Only occasionally she would catch her by the shoulders
and look into her eyes and tell her strange news of faery. But now she
felt cared for as she looked round the low room with its chair-bed and
little dressing-table hung with pink glazed calico. There was a text
over the fireplace:

'"Not a hair of thy head shall perish."'

It seemed particularly reassuring to Hazel as she brushed her long
shining coils before the hanging mirror. There was a bowl of double
primroses--red, mauve and white--on the window-sill, and a card 'with
Edward's love.'

Flowers in a bedroom were something very new. To her, as to so many
poor people, a bedroom was a stuffy place to crawl into at night and
get out of as quickly as possible in the morning.

'Eh! it'll be grand to live here,' she thought drowsily, as she lay
down in the cool clean sheets and heard the large clock on the wall of