eseen the possibility of those dear to him being
carried to a pauper's grave. It was a touching fact that he still kept
up the payment for Clara; who could say but his daughter might yet come
back to him to die? To know that he had lost that one stronghold
against fate was a stroke that left him scarcely strength to go about
his daily work.

And he could not breathe a word of it to his wife. Oh that better curse
of poverty, which puts corrupting poison into the wounds inflicted by
nature, which outrages the spirit's tenderness, which profanes with
unutterable defilement the secret places of the mourning heart! He
could not, durst not, speak a word of this misery to her whose
gratitude and love had resisted every trial, who had shared
uncomplainingly all the evil of his lot, and had borne with supreme
patience those added sufferings of which he had no conception. For she
lay on her deathbed. The doctor told him so on the very day when he
learnt that it would be out of his power to discharge the fitting
pieties at her grave. So far from looking to her for sympathy, it
behoved him to keep from her as much as a suspicion of what had
happened.

Their home at this time was a kitchen in King's Cross Road. The eldest
child, Amy, was now between ten and eleven; Annie was nine; Tom seven.
These, of course, went to school every day, and were being taught to
appreciate the woefulness of their inheritance. Amy was, on the whole,
a good girl; she could make purchases as well as her mother, and when
in the mood, look carefully after her little brother and sister; but
already she had begun to display restiveness under the hard discipline
to which the domestic poverty subjected her. Once she had played truant
from school, and told falsehoods to the teachers to explain her
absence. It was discovered that she had been tempted by other girls to
go and see the Lord Mayor's show. Annie and Tom threatened to be
troublesome when they got a little older; the boy could not be taught
to speak the truth, and his sister was constantly committing petty
thefts of jam, sugar, even coppers; and during the past year their
mother was seldom able to exert herself in correcting these faults.
Only by dint of struggle which cost her agonies could she discharge the
simplest duties of home. She made a brave fight against disease and
penury and incessant dread of the coming day, but month after month her
strength failed. Now at length she tried vainly to leav