e roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the
crumbling tiles, which fell one after the other, with a crashing noise,
on the pavement below. Dummie started in affright; and perhaps his
conscience smote him for the trick he had played with regard to the
false Bible. But the woman, whose excited and unstrung nerves led her
astray from one subject to another with preternatural celerity, said,
with an hysterical laugh, "See, Dummie, they come in state for me; give
me the cap--yonder--and bring the looking-glass!"

Dummie obeyed; and the woman, as she in a low tone uttered something
about the unbecoming colour of the ribbons, adjusted the cap on her
head, and then, saying in a regretful and petulant voice, "Why should
they have cut off my hair? Such a disfigurement!" bade Dummie desire
Mrs. Margery once more to ascend to her.

Left alone with her child, the face of the wretched mother softened as
she regarded him, and all the levities and all the vehemences--if we
may use the word--which, in the turbulent commotion of her delirium, had
been stirred upward to the surface of her mind, gradually now sank as
death increased upon her, and a mother's anxiety rose to the natural
level from which it had been disturbed and abased. She took the child
to her bosom, and clasping him in her arms, which grew weaker with every
instant, she soothed him with the sort of chant which nurses sing over
their untoward infants; but her voice was cracked and hollow, and as she
felt it was so, the mother's eyes filled with tears. Mrs. Margery now
reentered; and turning towards the hostess with an impressive calmness
of manner which astonished and awed the person she addressed, the dying
woman pointed to the child and said,--

"You have been kind to me, very kind, and may God bless you for it! I
have found that those whom the world calls the worst are often the most
human. But I am not going to thank you as I ought to do, but to ask of
you a last and exceeding favour. Protect my child till he grows up.
You have often said you loved him,--you are childless yourself,--and a
morsel of bread and a shelter for the night, which is all I ask of you
to give him, will not impoverish more legitimate claimants."

Poor Mrs. Margery, fairly sobbing, vowed she would be a mother to the
child, and that she would endeavour to rear him honestly; though a
public-house was not, she confessed, the best place for good examples.

"Take him," cried the mother,