exposure,
and it might be also with sorrow. She sat up, and looked wearily over
the winter scene before her. There was nothing of the querulous,
complaining tone of the little girl's voice in hers; only the dull,
sullen apathy of hopeless endurance.

"Cold, child!" she said. "'Tis like to be colder yet when the night
cometh."

"O Mother! and all snow now!"

"There be chiller gear than snow, maid," replied the mother bitterly.

"But it had been warmer in London, Mother?--if we had not lost our
road."

"May-be," was the answer, in a tone which seemed to imply that it did
not signify.

The child did not reply; and the woman continued to sit upright, and
look forward, with an absent expression in her face, indicating that the
mind was not where the eyes were.

"Only snow and frost!" she muttered--not speaking to the child. "Nought
beyond, nor here ne there. Nay, snow is better than snowed-up hearts.
Had it been warmer in London? May-be the hearts there had been as
frosty as at Pleshy. Well! it will be warm in the grave, and we shall
soon win yonder."

"Be there fires yonder, Mother?" asked the child innocently.

The woman laughed--a bitter, harsh laugh, in which there was no mirth.

"The devil keepeth," she said. "At least so say the priests. But what
wit they? They never went thither to see. They will, belike, some
day."

The little girl was silent again, and the mother, after a moment's
pause, resumed her interrupted soliloquy.

"If there were nought beyond, only!" she murmured; and her look and tone
of dull misery sharpened into vivid pain. "If a man might die, and have
done with it all! But to meet God! And 'tis no sweven, [dream] ne
fallacy, this dread undeadliness [immortality]--it is real. O all ye
blessed saints and martyrs in Heaven! how shall I meet God?"

"Is that holy Mary's Son, Mother?"

"Ay."

"Holy Mary will plead for us," suggested the child. "She can alway
peace her Son. But methought _He_ was good to folks, Mother. Sister
Christian was wont to say so."

"To saints and good women like Sister Christian, may-be."

"Art thou not good, Mother?"

The question was put in all innocence. But it struck the heart of the
miserable mother like a poisoned arrow.

"Good!" she cried, again in that tone of intense pain. "_I_ good? No,
Maude!--I am bad, bad, bad! From the crown of mine head to the sole of
my foot, there is nothing in me beside evil; such evil as thou, unwemme