never before felt; and when her mother neither moved nor spoke in
answer to her repeated cries, she knew that she was dead.

CHAPTER II

Little Meg as a Mourner

For the next day, and the night following, the corpse of the mother lay
silent and motionless in the room where her three children were living.
Meg cried bitterly at first; but there was Robin to be comforted, and
the baby to be played with when it laughed and crowed in her face.
Robin was nearly six years old, and had gained a vague, dim knowledge
of death by having followed, with a troop of other curious children,
many a funeral that had gone out from the dense and dirty dwellings to
the distant cemetery, where he had crept forward to the edge of the
grave, and peeped down into what seemed to him a very dark and dreadful
depth. When little Meg told him mother was dead, and lifted him up to
kneel on the bedside and kiss her icy lips for the last time, his
childish heart was filled with an awe which almost made him shrink from
the sight of that familiar face, scarcely whiter or more sunken now
than it had been for many a day past. But the baby stroked the quiet
cheeks, whilst chuckling and kicking in Meg's arms, and shouted, 'Mam!
mam! mam!' until she caught it away, and pressing it tightly to her
bosom, sat down on the floor by the bed, weeping.

'You've got no mam but me now, baby,' cried little Meg. She sat still
for a while, with Robin lying on the ground beside her, his face hidden
in her ragged frock; but the baby set up a pitiful little wail, and she
put aside her own grief to soothe it.

'Hush! hush!' sang Meg, getting up, and walking with baby about the
room. 'Hush, hush, my baby dear! By-by, my baby, by-by!'

Meg's sorrowful voice sank into a low, soft, sleepy tone, and presently
the baby fell fast asleep, when she laid it upon Robin's little
mattress, and covered it up gently with an old shawl. Robin was
standing at the foot of the bed, gazing at his mother with wide-open,
tearless eyes; and little Meg softly drew the sheet again over the pale
and rigid face.

'Robbie,' she said, 'let's sit in the window a bit.'

They had to climb up to the narrow window-sill by a broken chair which
stood under it; but when they were there, and Meg had her arm round
Robin, to hold him safe, they could see down into Angel Court, and into
the street beyond, with its swarms of busy and squalid people. Upon
the stone pavement far below them a number