sing one after the other from his eyes, his hollow cheeks quite
glazed with them.

'Is the pain so very bad?' she said in her soft voice, putting her hand
over his hot forehead, in the way that Alfred liked.

'I don't--know,' he answered; and his black eyes, after looking up once
in her face with the piteous earnest glance that some loving dogs have,
shut themselves as if on purpose to keep in the tears, but she saw the
dew squeezing out through the eye-lashes.

'My poor boy, I'm sure it's very bad for you,' she said again.

'Please, don't speak so kind,' said Paul; and this time he could not
prevent a-sob. 'Nobody ever did so before, and--' he paused, and went
on, 'I suppose they do it up in Heaven, so I hope I shall die.'

'You are vexing about the Union,' said Mrs. King, without answering this
last speech, or she knew that she should begin to cry herself.

'I _did_ think I'd done with them,' said Paul, with another sob. 'I said
I'd never set foot in those four walls again! I was proud, maybe; but
please don't stop with me! If you wouldn't look and speak like that, the
place wouldn't seem so hard, seeing I'm bred to it, as they say;' and he
made an odd sort of attempt to laugh, which ended in his choking himself
with worse tears.

'Harold is not gone yet,' said Mrs. King soothingly; 'we'll wait till he
comes in from his work, and see how you are, when you've had a little
sleep. Don't cry; you aren't going just yet.'

That same earnest questioning glance, but with more hope in it, was
turned on her again; but she did not dare to bind herself, much as she
longed to take the wanderer to her home. She went on to her son's room.

'Mother, Mother,' Alfred cried in a whisper, so eager that it made him
cough, 'you can't never send him to the workhouse?'

'I can't bear the thought, Alfy,' she said, the tears in her eyes; 'but I
don't know what to do. It's not the trouble. That I'd take with all my
heart, but it is hard enough to live, and--'

'I'm sure,' said Ellen, coming close, that her undertone might be heard,
'Harold and I would never mind how much we were pinched.'

'And I could go without--some things,' began Alfred.

'And then,' went on the mother, 'you see, if we got straitened, and
Matilda found it out, she'd want to help, and I can't have her savings
touched; and yet I can't bear to let that poor lad be sent off, so ill as
he is, and after all he's done for Harold--such a good boy, too, and one