l overturn.
I had better get you home at once."

"But the linen?"

"I will look after that--only lean on me. The boy can stay here and
watch it till I come back and wash what is left; it is not much."

The poor laundress's limbs trembled under her. "I have stood too long in
the cold water; I have had no food since yesterday. O, my poor child!"
and she wept.

The boy cried too, as he sat alone beside the brook, watching the wet
linen. Slowly the two women made their way up the little alley and
through the street, past the sheriff's house. Just as she reached her
humble home, the laundress fell down on the paving-stones, fainting.
She was carried upstairs and put to bed. Kind Maren hastened to prepare
a cup of warm ale--that was the best medicine in this case, she
thought--and then went back to the brook and did the best she could with
the linen.

In the evening she was again in the laundress's miserable room. She had
begged from the sheriff's cook a few roasted potatoes and a little bit
of bacon, for the sick woman. Maren and the boy feasted upon these, but
the patient was satisfied with the smell of them--that, she declared,
was very nourishing.

Supper over, the boy went to bed, lying crosswise at his mother's feet,
with a coverlet made of old carpet-ends, blue and red, sewed together.

The Laundress now felt a little better; the warm ale had strengthened
her, the smell of the meat had done her good.

"Now, you good soul," said she to Maren, "I will tell you all about it,
while the boy is asleep. That he is already; look at him, how sweetly he
looks with his eyes closed; he little thinks how his mother has
suffered. May he never feel the like! Well, I was in service with the
sheriff's parents when their youngest son, the student, came home; I was
a wild young thing then, but honest--that I must say for myself. And the
student was so pleasant and merry, a better youth never lived. He was a
son of the house, I only a servant, but we became sweethearts--all in
honor and honesty--and he told his mother that he loved me; she was like
an angel in his eyes, so wise, kind, and loving! And he went away, but
his gold ring of betrothal was on my finger. When he was really gone, my
mistress called me in to speak to her; so grave, yet so kind she looked,
so wisely she spoke, like an angel, indeed. She showed me what a gulf of
difference in tastes, habits, arid mind lay between her son and me. 'He
sees you now to be good-h