f awe and
grief and wonder. To compare a great thing to a small, she was to
their eyes as a ruined, desecrated shrine to the eyes of the saint's
own peculiar worshipper. I may compare her to what I please, great
or small--to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled
feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy
ghost in the desert--a woman in wretchedness and rags. She carried
her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl.
To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes. As
she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand
from under the shawl--stretched out no arm, held out only a hand
from the wrist, white against the night. Donal had no money.
Gibbie had a shilling. The hand closed upon it, a gleam crossed
the sad face, and a murmur of thanks fluttered from the thin lips as
she walked on her way. The youths breathed deep, and felt a little
relieved, but only a little. The thought of the woman wandering in
the dark and the fog and the night, was a sickness at their hearts.
Was it impossible to gather such under the wings of any
night-brooding hen? That Gibbie had gone through so much of the
same kind of thing himself, and had found it endurable enough, did
not make her case a whit the less pitiful in his eyes, and indeed it
was widely, sadly different from his. Along the deserted street,
which looked to Donal like a waterless canal banked by mounds of
death, and lighted by phosphorescent grave-damps, they followed her
with their eyes, the one living thing, fading away from lamp to
lamp; and when they could see her no farther, followed her with
their feet; they could not bear to lose sight of her. But they kept
just on the verge of vision, for they did not want her to know the
espial of their love. Suddenly she disappeared, and keeping their
eyes on the spot as well as they could, they found when they reached
it a little shop, with a red curtain, half torn down, across the
glass door of it. A dim oil lamp was burning within. It looked
like a rag-shop, dirty and dreadful. There she stood, while a woman
with a bloated face, looking to Donal like a feeder of hell-swine,
took from some secret hole underneath, a bottle which seemed to
Gibbie the very one his father used to drink from. He would have
rushed in and dashed it from her hand, but Donal withheld him.

"Hoots!" he said, "we canna follow her a' nicht; an' gien we did,