peal for help
would touch their sordid hearts; and yet food must be had, but how she
knew not. Her promise to give her child food, on the next day, was
made only to silence his call for bread. There was no prospect of
receiving any money, and she could not see her children starve. But
one recourse was left. She must sell the bed--the last piece of
furniture remaining in the room--no matter that in so doing her
wretchedness increased instead of diminished.

The child was not satisfied with her promise. The pangs he endured
were too much for one of his age, and again he uttered his call for
bread.

"There is no bread, Willy," said Eva, speaking for the first time.
"Don't ask for any bread. It makes mamma sad."

The child opened his large blue eyes enquiringly upon his sister.

"My sweet, darling child," exclaimed Mrs. Wentworth, clasping the
little Ella to her heart, and then bursting into tears at this proof
of her child's fortitude, she continued: "Are you not hungry, too?"

"Yes, mother," she replied, "but"--Here the little girl ceased to
speak as if desirous of sparing her mother pain.

"But what?" asked Mrs. Wentworth.

"Mother," exclaimed the child, throwing her arms round her mother's
neck, and evading the question, "father will come back to us, and then
we will not want bread."

The word "father," brought to Mrs. Wentworth's mind her absent
husband. She thought of the agony he would endure if he knew that his
wife and children were suffering for food. A swelling of her bosom
told of the emotion raging within her, and again the tears started to
her eyes.

"Come, my sweet boy," she said, dashing away the tears, as they came
like dewdrops from her eyelids, and speaking to the infant on her
knee, "it is time to go to bed."

"Aint I to get some bread before I go to bed?" he asked.

"There is none, darling," she answered hastily. "Wait until to-morrow
and you will get some."

"But I am so hungry," again repeated the child, and again a pang of
wretchedness shot through the mother's breast.

"Never mind," she observed, kissing him fondly, "if you love me, let
me put you to bed like a good child."

"I love you!" he said, looking up into her eyes with all that deep
love that instinct gives to children.

She undressed and put him to bed, where the little Ella followed him
soon after. Mrs. Wentworth sat by the bedside until they had fallen
asleep.

"I love you, mother, but I am so hungry," were the last