ossessed.

I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and
whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure,--for I had several
little things to say to him,--when I noticed a poor woman lingering about
the closed gates. She had a baby sleeping in her arms. It was a spring
night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim;
and the woman's figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now
there, on one side or another of the gate. She stopped when she saw me
approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden
resolution. I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was
going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her
address. She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I
felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey,
and said, "It's Mr. Philip?" in a low voice.

"What do you want with me?" I said.

Then she poured forth suddenly, without warning or preparation, her long
speech,--a flood of words which must have been all ready and waiting at
the doors of her lips for utterance. "Oh, sir, I want to speak to you! I
can't believe you'll be so hard, for you're young; and I can't believe
he'll be so hard if so be as his own son, as I've always heard he had but
one, 'll speak up for us. Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you,
that, if you ain't comfortable in one room, can just walk into another;
but if one room is all you have, and every bit of furniture you have
taken out of it, and nothing but the four walls left,--not so much as the
cradle for the child, or a chair for your man to sit down upon when he
comes from his work, or a saucepan to cook him his supper--"

"My good woman," I said, "who can have taken all that from you? Surely
nobody can be so cruel?"

"You say it's cruel!" she cried with a sort of triumph. "Oh, I knowed you
would, or any true gentleman that don't hold with screwing poor folks.
Just go and say that to him inside there for the love of God. Tell him
to think what he's doing, driving poor creatures to despair. Summer's
coming, the Lord be praised, but yet it's bitter cold at night with your
counterpane gone; and when you've been working hard all day, and nothing
but four bare walls to come home to, and all your poor little sticks of
furniture that you've saved up for, and got together one by one, all
gone, and you no better than when you starte