erself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely,
she drew him towards her, and gazed on his terrified features with a
look in which exhaustion and an exceeding wanness of complexion were
even horribly contrasted by the glare and energy of delirium.

"If you are like him," she muttered, "I will strangle you,--I will! Ay,
tremble, you ought to tremble when your mother touches you, or when
he is mentioned. You have his eyes, you have! Out with them, out,--the
devil sits laughing in them! Oh, you weep, do you, little one? Well,
now, be still, my love; be hushed! I would not harm thee! Harm--O
God, he is my child after all!" And at these words she clasped the boy
passionately to her breast, and burst into tears.

"Coom, now, coom," said Dummie, soothingly; "take the stuff, Judith, and
then ve'll talk over the hurchin!"

The mother relaxed her grasp of the boy, and turning towards the
speaker, gazed at him for some moments with a bewildered stare; at
length she appeared slowly to remember him, and said, as she raised
herself on one hand, and pointed the other towards him with an inquiring
gesture,--"Thou hast brought the book?"

Dummie answered by lifting up the book he had brought from the honest
butcher's.

"Clear the room, then," said the sufferer, with that air of mock command
so common to the insane. "We would be alone!"

Dummie winked at the good woman at the foot of the bed; and she
(though generally no easy person to order or to persuade) left, without
reluctance, the sick chamber.

"If she be a going to pray," murmured our landlady (for that office did
the good matron hold), "I may indeed as well take myself off, for it's
not werry comfortable like to those who be old to hear all that 'ere!"

With this pious reflection, the hostess of the Mug,--so was the hostelry
called,--heavily descended the creaking stairs. "Now, man," said the
sufferer, sternly, "swear that you will never reveal,--swear, I say! And
by the great God whose angels are about this night, if ever you break
the oath, I will come back and haunt you to your dying day!"

Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the
vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered, as he
kissed the pretended Bible, that he swore to keep the secret, as much as
he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As
he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney,
and shook th