coaxed Minta to take the doctor's "medicine." Minta
swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it
roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and
tottered across to Willie.

"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he's got his animals--he don't think
of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won't you think of your father?--you'll
never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"

The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard,
dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face,
and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He
looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not
speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it
struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and
there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced
Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had
fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same
as it had been for days; she reassured herself.

And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching
limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed
the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of
the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.

Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself
with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock
showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she
drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.

A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes
of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on
her cloak.

A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the
chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside
her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of
ear, and imagined more.

All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look
round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn
across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the
light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without
at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door
of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came
out stumbling and