trouble alone; for the preliminaries of selling the Lincoln business
had brought old Wright's creditors about her husband's ears like a
swarm of wasps. Until then they had waited with fair patience: but
no sooner did he make a perfectly honest move towards paying them off
in a lump than the whole swarm took panic and he was forced to decamp
to London to escape the sponging-house. There Uncle Matthew came to
the rescue, satisfied immediate claims, and guaranteed the rest.
But meanwhile Hetty's child--a boy, as she had prayed--was born, and
died on the third day after birth.

She hardly dared to think of it--of the poor mite and the hopes she
had built on him. As she had told Charles, she was sorry, but not
penitent--at least not wholly penitent. Once she had been wholly
penitent: but the tyrannous compulsion of her marriage had eased or
deadened her sense of responsibility. Henceforth she had no duty but
to make the best of it. So she told herself, and had conscientiously
striven to make the best of it. She had even succeeded, up to a
point; by shutting herself within doors and busily, incessantly,
spinning a life of illusion. She was a penitent--a woman in a book--
redeeming her past by good conduct. The worst of it was that her
husband declined to help the cheat. He was proud of her, honest man!
and had no fancy at all for the _role_ assigned to him, of "all for
love, and the world well lost." That she refused to be shown off he
set down to sulkiness; and went off of an evening to taverns and
returned fuddled. She studied, above all things, to make home bright
for him, and ever met him with a smile: and this was good enough, yet
not (as it slowly grew clear to her) precisely what he wanted.
So she had been driven to build fresh hopes on the unborn babe.
_He_ would make all the difference: would win his father back, or at
worst give her own life a new foundation for hope. Her son should be
a gentleman: she would deny herself and toil and live for him.

And now God had resumed His gift, and her life was blank indeed.
She might have another--and another might die. She had never
supposed that this one could die, and its death gave her a dreadful
feeling of insecurity--as if no child of hers could ever be reared.
What then? The prospect of pardon by continued good conduct seemed
to her shadowy indeed. Something more was needed. Yes, penitence
was needed; _real_ penitence: urgently, she felt the need of it