feeling of sympathy with the sorrowful at the solemn hours when
the ceaseless stars are seen to pace its depths.

By-and-by her eye fell down to gazing at the corresponding window to her
own, on the opposite side of the court. It was lighted, but the blind
was drawn down: upon the blind she saw, first unconsciously, the constant
weary motion of a little spectral shadow, a child's hand and arm--no
more; long, thin fingers hanging down from the wrist, while the arm
moved up and down, as if keeping time to the heavy pulses of dull pain.
She could not help hoping that sleep would soon come to still that
incessant, feeble motion: and now and then it did cease, as if the
little creature had dropped into a slumber from very weariness; but
presently the arm jerked up with the fingers clenched, as if with a
sudden start of agony. When Anne came up to bed, Libbie was still
sitting, watching the shadow, and she directly asked to whom it
belonged.

"It will be Margaret Hall's lad. Last summer, when it was so hot, there
was no biding with the window shut at night, and theirs was open too:
and many's the time he has waked me with his moans; they say he's been
better sin' cold weather came."

"Is he always in bed? Whatten ails him?" asked Libbie.

"Summat's amiss wi' his backbone, folks say; he's better and worse,
like. He's a nice little chap enough, and his mother's not that bad
either; only my mother and her had words, so now we don't speak."

Libbie went on watching, and when she next spoke, to ask who and what
his mother was, Anne Dixon was fast asleep.

Time passed away, and as usual unveiled the hidden things. Libbie
found out that Margaret Hall was a widow, who earned her living as a
washerwoman; that the little suffering lad was her only child, her
dearly beloved. That while she scolded, pretty nearly, everybody else,
"till her name was up" in the neighbourhood for a termagant, to him she
was evidently most tender and gentle. He lay alone on his little bed,
near the window, through the day, while she was away toiling for a
livelihood. But when Libbie had plain sewing to do at her lodgings,
instead of going out to sew, she used to watch from her bedroom window
for the time when the shadows opposite, by their mute gestures, told
that the mother had returned to bend over her child, to smooth his
pillow, to alter his position, to get him his nightly cup of tea. And
often in the night Libbie could not help rising gently from