the eager child to her grandfather, who hung his head and bent his eyes
upon the ground. 'I'll direct you from the door, the best I can. I
wish I could do more.'

He showed them, then, by which road they must leave the town, and what
course they should hold when they had gained it. He lingered so long
on these instructions, that the child, with a fervent blessing, tore
herself away, and stayed to hear no more.

But, before they had reached the corner of the lane, the man came
running after them, and, pressing her hand, left something in it--two
old, battered, smoke-encrusted penny pieces. Who knows but they shone
as brightly in the eyes of angels, as golden gifts that have been
chronicled on tombs?

And thus they separated; the child to lead her sacred charge farther
from guilt and shame; the labourer to attach a fresh interest to the
spot where his guests had slept, and read new histories in his furnace
fire.

CHAPTER 45

In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they had
never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and open
country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning, when,
deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the mercies of a
strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless things they had
known and loved, behind--not even then, had they so yearned for the
fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as now, when the noise
and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing town reeking with lean
misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them in on every side, and
seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible.

'Two days and nights!' thought the child. 'He said two days and nights
we should have to spend among such scenes as these. Oh! if we live to
reach the country once again, if we get clear of these dreadful places,
though it is only to lie down and die, with what a grateful heart I
shall thank God for so much mercy!'

With thoughts like this, and with some vague design of travelling to a
great distance among streams and mountains, where only very poor and
simple people lived, and where they might maintain themselves by very
humble helping work in farms, free from such terrors as that from which
they fled--the child, with no resource but the poor man's gift, and no
encouragement but that which flowed from her own heart, and its sense
of the truth and right of what she did, nerved herself to this last
journey and boldly pursued h