at on the thresholds of their doors, smoking an early pipe! and their
tidy children, the boys with hair combed straight, and the girls with
clean pinafores, came abroad; some to carry the Sunday dinner to the
baker's, and others to nurse the baby in the sunshine, or to snatch a
bit of play behind a neighbour's dwelling. The contrast within the
corner-house was strange. Morris and the boy had been up early to
gather the stones, and sweep up the fragments of glass from the floors,
to put the effigy out of sight, and efface the marks of feet in the hall
and parlours. The supper had been cleared away in the kitchen, and the
smell of spirits and tobacco got rid of: but this was all that the most
zealous servants could do. The front shutters must remain closed, and
the garden windows empty of glass. The garden itself was a mournful
spectacle,--the pretty garden, which had been the pride and pleasure of
the family all this spring; part of the wall was thrown down; the ivy
trailed on the earth. Of the shrubs, some were pulled up, and others
cut off at the roots. The beds were trodden into clay, and the grass,
so green and sunny yesterday, was now trampled black where it was not
hidden with fragments of the wood-work of the surgery, and with the
refuse of the broken glasses and spilled drugs. Hope had also risen
early. He had found his scared pupil returned, and wandering about the
ruins of his abode,--the surgery. They set to work together, to put out
of sight whatever was least seemly of the scattered contents of the
professional apartment; but, with all their pains, the garden looked
forlorn and disagreeable enough when Hester came down, shawled, to make
breakfast in the open air of the parlour, and her husband thought it
time to go and see how Maria had passed the night, and to bring Margaret
home.

Hester received from her husband and sister a favourable report of
Maria. She had slept, and Margaret had slept beside her. Maria carried
her philosophy into all the circumstances of her lot, and she had been
long used to pain and interruption of her plans. These things, and the
hurry of an accident in the street, might dismay one inexperienced in
suffering, but not her. When not kept awake by actual pain, she slept;
and when assured that her case was perfectly simple, and that there was
every probability of her being as well as usual in a few weeks, all her
anxieties were for the Hopes. No report of them could have