shed
many a tear of loneliness and terror. Her heart was full of anxious
fears as to what was going to become of her.

She had stolen into the room where the dead woman lay to take her last
farewell of her benefactress. Nobody watched there, and Hetty easily
found an opportunity for paying her tearful visit. Scamp, who never left
her side, accompanied her with a sad solemnity in his countenance, and
these were perhaps the two most real mourners whom the wealthy lady had
left behind her.

Now all was over, and Mrs. Rushton's room looked vacant and with as
little sign of her presence as if she had never inhabited it. The wintry
sunshine smiled in at all the windows of her handsome house, and made it
cheerful even though the blinds were drawn down. The robins twittered in
the evergreens outside, and the maids had their little jokes as usual
over their sewing, though they spoke in lowered tones. No great and
terrible change seemed to have happened to any one but Hetty, except
indeed to Scamp, and it was plain that he suffered only for Hetty's
sake.

On the day when Mrs. Rushton's relations met at Amber Hill Hetty sat in
the housekeeper's room in a little straw chair at the fire, with Scamp
clasped in her arms and her head resting against his. She felt
instinctively that her fate was being sealed upstairs. Indeed a few
words which had passed between Grant and the housekeeper, and which she
had accidentally overheard, assured her that such would be the case.

"If Mrs. Rushton has left her nothing," said Grant, "she'll be out on
the world again, as she was before. Mrs. Kane may take her, unless the
gentlemen do something for her."

"Mr. Enderby will never allow her to go back to poor Anne Kane," said
the housekeeper. "There's many a cheap way of providing for a friendless
child, and it wouldn't be fair to put her on a woman that can hardly
keep her own little home together."

Hetty's anguish was unspeakable as these words sank into her heart, each
one making a wound. She shuddered at the thought of going back to Mrs.
Kane, but felt even more horror of those unknown "cheap ways of
providing for a friendless child," alluded to by the housekeeper. A
perfect sea of tribulation rolled over her head as she bent it in
despair, and wept forlornly on Scamp's comfortable neck.

In the meantime, as Hetty surmised, her fate was being decided upstairs.
No provision had been made by Mrs. Rushton for the child whom she had
taken in