ent was a hundred times greater
than her sin, she said to herself, and that was all. What a strange
stunned quietness was over her; the pain and the fever seemed all
burned out. She did not suffer now. If something that felt like an
iron claw would leave off gripping her heart, she could almost have
felt comfortable. Maurice must die, she knew that, but something else
had died before him. She wondered if it were this same heart of hers;
and then she noticed her baby's hood was crooked, and stopped at the
next lamp-post to put it straight, and felt a vague sort of pity for
it, when she saw its face was pinched and blue with cold, and pressed
it closer to her, though she rather hoped to find it dead when she
reached home.

"One less to suffer and to starve," thought Nea.

Maurice's wistful eyes greeted her when she opened the door, but she
only shook her head and said nothing; what had she to say? She gave
her half-frozen infant into a neighbor's care, and then sat down and
drew Maurice's face to her bosom, still speechless in that awful
apathy.

And there she sat hour after hour, till he died peacefully in her
arms, and his last words were, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins."

* * * * *

When she had ceased to wish for them, friends came around her in her
trouble, and ministered to her wants.

Kind faces followed Maurice to his last resting-place, and saved him
from a pauper's grave.

The widow and her children were clothed in decent mourning, and placed
in comfortable lodgings.

Nea never roused from her silent apathy, never looked at them or
thanked them.

Their kindness had come too late for her, she said to herself, and it
was not until long afterward that she knew that she owed all this
consideration to the family of their kind old friend Mr. Dobson,
secretly aided by the purse of her cousin Beatrice Huntingdon, who
dare not come in person to see her. But by and by they spoke very
firmly and kindly to her. They pointed to her children--they had
placed her boy at an excellent school--and told her that for their
sakes she must live and work. If she brooded longer in that sullen
despair she would die or go mad; and they brought her baby to her, and
watched its feeble arms trying to clasp her neck; saw the widow's
passionate tears rain on its innocent face--the tears that saved the
poor hot brain--and knew she was saved; and by and by, when they
thought she had regained he