on his getting off. And he
didn't know that he wanted to, neither. Once she took Willie to see him;
the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, "though any one
can see, miss, he's just sick for 'im," would not hear of his coming
again. Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his
chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a
kind of animal lethargy. Westall's name always roused him. Hate still
survived. But it made _her_ life faint within her to talk of the
murdered man--wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant's
realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.
When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was
locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the
bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this
awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she
left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once,
and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann
Mullins's rough face waiting for her--of the outer air and the free
heaven.

As for Willie, he was fast dwindling. Another week or two--the doctor
said--no more. He lay on Marcella's knee on a pillow, wasted to an
infant's weight, panting and staring with those strange blue eyes, but
always patient, always struggling to say his painful "thank you" when
she fed him with some of the fruit constantly sent her from Maxwell
Court. Everything that was said about his father he took in and
understood, but he did not seem to fret. His mother was almost divided
from him by this passivity of the dying; nor could she give him or his
state much attention. Her gentle, sensitive, but not profound nature was
strained already beyond bearing by more gnawing griefs.

After her long sit in Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the
February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole
upon her--the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the
swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and
out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face
kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison.
More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved
upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its
significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.