e hollow down by the flare?'

'Ah! That's the name! You can find a lady there, I know.'

'More easily than I can make one of such material as myself, Jenny.'

The sparkling eye looked steadfastly up, as the musing face looked
thoughtfully down. 'Well?' said the dolls' dressmaker, 'We have found
our lady?'

Lizzie nodded, and asked, 'Shall she be rich?'

'She had better be, as he's poor.'

'She is very rich. Shall she be handsome?'

'Even you can be that, Lizzie, so she ought to be.'

'She is very handsome.'

'What does she say about him?' asked Miss Jenny, in a low voice:
watchful, through an intervening silence, of the face looking down at
the fire.

'She is glad, glad, to be rich, that he may have the money. She is glad,
glad, to be beautiful, that he may be proud of her. Her poor heart--'

'Eh? Her poor hear?' said Miss Wren.

'Her heart--is given him, with all its love and truth. She would
joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he
has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like
one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and
think well of. And she says, that lady rich and beautiful that I can
never come near, "Only put me in that empty place, only try how little
I mind myself, only prove what a world of things I will do and bear for
you, and I hope that you might even come to be much better than you are,
through me who am so much worse, and hardly worth the thinking of beside
you."'

As the face looking at the fire had become exalted and forgetful in the
rapture of these words, the little creature, openly clearing away
her fair hair with her disengaged hand, had gazed at it with earnest
attention and something like alarm. Now that the speaker ceased, the
little creature laid down her head again, and moaned, 'O me, O me, O
me!'

'In pain, dear Jenny?' asked Lizzie, as if awakened.

'Yes, but not the old pain. Lay me down, lay me down. Don't go out of
my sight to-night. Lock the door and keep close to me. Then turning away
her face, she said in a whisper to herself, 'My Lizzie, my poor Lizzie!
O my blessed children, come back in the long bright slanting rows, and
come for her, not me. She wants help more than I, my blessed children!'

She had stretched her hands up with that higher and better look, and
now she turned again, and folded them round Lizzie's neck, and rocked
herself on Lizzie's breast.

Chapter 12

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