uth.

"Very, very cruel; but then he was angry. The men had angered him. He
was sore put about. Poor Willy, he suffers much. Yet it was cruel; it
_was_ cruel, indeed it was."

Rotha walked across the kitchen and again took hold of the
rannel-tree. It was as though her tempest-tossed soul were traversing
afresh every incident of the scenes that had just before been enacted
on that spot where now she stood alone.

Alone! the burden of a new grief was with her. To be suspected of
selfish motives when nothing but sacrifice had been in her heart, that
was hard to bear. To be suspected of such motives by that man, of all
others, who should have looked into her heart and seen what lay there,
that was yet harder. "Willy's sore put about, poor lad," she told
herself again; but close behind this soothing reflection crept the
biting memory, "It was cruel, what he said; indeed it was."

The girl tried to shake off the distress which the last incident had
perhaps chiefly occasioned. It was natural that her own little sorrow
should be uppermost, but the heart that held it was too deep to hold
her personal sorrow only.

Rotha stepped into the room adjoining, which for her convenience, as
well as that of the invalid, had been made the bedroom of Mrs. Ray.
Placid and even radiant in its peacefulness lay the face of Ralph's
mother. There was not even visible at this moment the troubled
expression which, to Rotha's mind, denoted the baffled effort to say,
"God bless you!" Thank God, she at least was unconscious of what had
happened and was still happening! It was with the thought of her
alone--the weak, unconscious sufferer, near to death--that Rotha had
said that worse might occur. Such an eviction from house and home
might bring death yet nearer. To be turned into the road, without
shelter--whether justly or unjustly, what could it matter? --this
would be death itself to the poor creature that lay here.

No, it could not, it should not happen, if she had power to prevent
it.

Rotha reached over the bed and put her arms about the head of the
invalid and fervently kissed the placid face. Then the girl's fair
head, with its own young face already ploughed deep with labor and
sorrow, fell on to the pillow, and rested there, while the silent
tears coursed down her cheeks.

"Not if I can prevent it," she whispered to the deaf ears. But in the
midst of her thought for another, and that other Willy's mother as
well as Ralph's, like a