hitherto been fair and
pleasant, broke up, and still she held on, with the rain beating from
the westward in her face, as though to stay her from her refuge, dizzy
and confused, but determined still, along the miry high-road.

She had learnt from a gipsy woman, with whom she had walked in company
for some hours, how to carry her child across her back, slung in her
shawl. So, with her breast bare to the storm, she fought her way over
the high bleak downs, glad and happy when the boy ceased his wailing,
and lay warm and sheltered behind her, swathed in every poor rag she
could spare from her numbed and dripping body.

Late on a wild rainy night she reached Exeter, utterly penniless, and
wet to the skin. She had had nothing to eat since noon, and her breast
was failing from want of nourishment and over-exertion. Still it was
only twenty miles further. Surely, she thought, God had not saved her
through two hundred such miles, to perish at last. The child was dry
and warm, and fast asleep, if she could get some rest in one of the
doorways in the lower part of the town, till she was stronger she could
fight her way on to Drumston; so she held on to St. Thomas's, and
finding an archway drier than the others sat down, and took the child
upon her lap.

Rest!--rest was a fiction; she was better walking--such aches, and
cramps, and pains in every joint! She would get up and push on, and yet
minute after minute went by, and she could not summon courage.

She was sitting with her beautiful face in the light of a lamp. A woman
well and handsomely dressed was passing rapidly through the rain, but
on seeing her stopped and said:--

"My poor girl, why do you sit there in the damp entry, such a night as
this?"

"I am cold, hungry, ruined; that's why I sit under the arch," replied
Mary, rising up.

"Come home with me," said the woman; "I will take care of you."

"I am going to my friends," replied she.

"Are you sure they will be glad to see you, my dear," said the woman,
"with that pretty little pledge at your bosom?"

"I care not," said Mary, "I told you I was desperate."

"Desperate, my pretty love," said the woman; "a girl with beauty like
yours should never be desperate; come with me."

Mary stepped forward and struck her, so full and true that the woman
reeled backwards, and stood whimpering and astonished.

"Out! you false jade," said Mary; "you are one of those devils that
Saxon told me of, who come whispering, and