you, for the
shame that will come? For the man who will never come?"

The girl sank back, shuddering and weeping. The woman covered her head
and went out, and presently returned; and in the grey of the evening,
which within the walls fell early, the two left the house, the elder
carrying a bundle of clothes, the younger whimpering and wondering.
Stupefied by the suddenness of the movement, and her mother's stern
purpose, she did not observe that they had left the door on the latch,
and the House on the Wall unguarded.

The people with whom they had found a lodging, a little room under the
sharply sloping tiles, knew them by name and sight--that in so small a
place was inevitable--but found nothing strange in the woman's reason
for moving; she said that at home the firing broke her daughter's rest.
The housewife indeed could sympathize with her, and did so. "I never go
to bed myself," she said roundly, "but I dream of those wretches sacking
the town, and look to awake with my throat cut."

"Tut--tut!" her husband answered angrily. "You will live to wag your
tongue and make mischief a score of years yet. And for the town being
sacked, there is small chance of that--in these days."

The elder of his new lodgers repeated his words. "Small chance of that?"
she said mechanically. "Is that so?"

The man looked at her with patronage. "Little or none," he said. "If we
have to cry Enough, we shall cry it in time, and on terms you may be
sure; and they will march in like gentlemen, and an end of it."

"But if it happen at night?" the woman asked curiously. She felt a
strange compulsion to put the question. "If they should take us by
surprise? What then?"

The man shrugged his shoulders. "Well, then, of course, things might be
different," he said. "But, sho! it won't happen. No fear!" he continued
hastily, and in a tone that belied his words. "And you, wife, get back
to your pots and leave this talking! You frighten yourself to death with
imaginings!"

The woman from the House on the Wall went upstairs to her garret. She
did not repent of what she had done; but a sense of its greatness began
to take hold of her, and whether she would or not, she found herself
waiting--waiting and watching for she alone knew what. Given a companion
less preoccupied with misery and she must have been suspected. But the
girl lay moodily on her bed, and the widow was at liberty to stand at
the window with her hands spread on the sill, and look