Now, the root of this girl's purpose was holy,
and yet her next act was the drop of evil that
overflowed the cup of her misery, and turned
trouble into sin.

She was so weary, that the earth seemed
to drag her failing limbs towards it. Her eyes
were fixed on the opposite wall, looking at a
filmy picture present to them—a dying man,
struggling with his death, alone in darkness.
She heard not the shouts and curses in the
street outside, nor the bargaining of the two
men in the inner room, but a voice calling
"Drink! drink!" She heard the horrible, greedy
cry "Whisky!" gurgling in a dying throat.
Her sunken eyes started forward, her hands
wrought with one another. She gazed all
around the shop. No one near her, no one
minding her; and the coat still lying on the
counter.

For one moment she was raised to the
dignity of resisting temptation. Only one moment;
need was too great, habit too strong, misery
too deep. The coat was snatched, and the girl
vanished.

The two men returned only about a minute
too late, and rushed into the street crying "Stop
thief!'' The cry was echoed and tossed from
lip to lip in the dirty lanes and alleys. Drunken
men reeled out of taverns and caught it,
wretched children yelled it along the gutter. It
clamoured in the hunted creature's ears as she
strained her weak limbs along the pavement, or
huddled herself into some corner to let the
pursuers go by. "It is the last time, the last
time!" she muttered. So it was, the last sin
of many; but not to go unpunished.

The cry had long ceased, and the chase had been
abandoned, when the dark figure crept in at a
miserable doorway, and up a dirty, crazy flight
of stairs. She had no coat in her hands now,
but some money, and a small bottle. She looked
from right to left with scared eyes, and then
entered a squalid room where the dawn was stealing
wanly through a broken skylight in the roof,
The walls were perfectly bare; there was no sign
of food, furniture, nor clothing. The girl looked
eagerly towards a corner where the figure of a
man lay stretched upon straw. She went
forward, listening and gazing intently, and dropped
on her knees beside the figure.

"Here it is," she said, in a voice of fright
that matched her face; "here is the whisky. I
could not get it any sooner."

There was no answer by sound or movement.

"Father!" she shrieked, with a wild sob. She
lifted an awful-looking hand from the straw, and
dropped it again. The figure on the pallet was
a corpse. The cries that had rung through the
room when she left it were still for ever.

She drew a covering over the body, looked
round the bare walls of the den, and sat down
on the floor with a passive despair in her white
face. Her foot touched the bottle of spirits. She
snatched it up and half emptied it at a draught,
stretched herself on the straw at the feet of the
corpse, and soon fell into a state of unconsciousness
that answered with her for peace.

This is the history of Molly's crime. It is
quite useless for the purposes of this story to
go back any further into her past. It is not
easy to get at the true antecedents of such
creatures. One, would have told you that Molly
Cashel was a charwoman; another, that she was
a ballad-singer; another, that she was a street-
vagrant; another, that she was a thief. Each
account would have been true, for she had
been all of these things in turns. She had
been dragged through every kind of misery
from her wretched motherless childhood until
now, her nineteenth year. She had been
ill-treated and made a slave of by a brutal step-
father—the man whose last desire she had sinned
to strive to satisfy. A worn-out, battered creature,
who had never had any youth, who had
never been taught, who had been driven on all
her life by the instincts and necessities of the
present moment.

It was only six o'clock, but the June sun
was shining hotly down into the filthy alleys,
glistening on the mud made by the rain of the
night before, and burning on the broken
window-panes crusted with dirt and stuffed with
rags; and the Rooneys were up already, and
fighting as usual. The Rooneys were a family
of wandering mountebanks, who lodged at
present in the room under that in which Molly
Cashel and her father's corpse were lying.
This den was a singular contrast to the one
above it—not that there was a whit more
comfort to be seen within it; but whereas the one
was bare, and full of the silence of death, the
other was overflowing with all kinds of litter,
and echoing with the quarrelsome shouting of
noisy voices. The remains of a coarse breakfast
lay about a dirty bench at one side of the
room, and heaps of frippery rags mingled with
tinsel gewgaws were scattered about in all
directions on the floor. The Rooney mother,
a stout broad-faced vixenish-looking woman,
was engaged in pasting daubs of gold paper all
over a very dirty white muslin short frock—
part of the costume usually worn by Miss
Matilda Rooney when dancing the sailor's
hornpipe. The Rooney father, who, when
he was not in a passion, had a general air
of humorous rowdiness, was adorned by nature
with a squint, and by accident with a broken
nose, which last was fiery in colour. He
was now occupying himself (with one arm in
one sleeve of a ragged coat) by knocking the
ashes out of his pipe and his knuckles on the
heads of his two sons, who were unwillingly
practising somersaults in one corner, and
responding to the paternal correction by loud
growls of remonstrance. Miss Matilda Rooney,
a dwarf of sixteen years who looked
about ten, was busied in twisting battered
artificial flowers together, for the adornment of
her own elf-locks of rusty red and the enhancement
of the beauty of the paternal squint, which
she inherited in full perfection. As she worked,
she beguiled her task by stray words of
impudence flung at her father and mother, and frowns