helpless character to feel his loss as
principally affecting herself and her children.

"Not alone," said Mr. Hale, solemnly.
"Who is with you? Who will take up your
cause? " The widow opened her eyes wide,
and looked at the new speaker, of whose
presence she had not been aware till then.

"Who has promised to be a father to the
fatherless? " continued he.

"But I 've getten six children, sir, and
the eldest not eight years of age. I'm
not meaning for to doubt His power, sir,—
only it needs a deal o' trust;" and she began
to cry afresh.

"Hoo 'll be better able to talk to-morrow,
sir," said the neighbour. "Best comfort now
would be the feel of a child at her heart.
I 'm sorry they took the babby."

"I 'll go for it," said Margaret. And in a
few minutes she returned, carrying Johnnie,
his face all smeared with eating, and his
hands loaded with treasures in the shape of
shells, and bits of crystal, and the head of a
plaster figure. She placed him in his mother's
arms.

"There! " said the woman, "now you go.
They 'll cry together, and comfort together,
better nor any one but a child can do. I'll
stop with her as long as I'm needed, and if
yo come to-morrow, yo can have a deal o'
wise talk with her, that she's not up to
to-day."

As Margaret and her father went slowly
up the street, she paused at Higgins's closed
door.

"Shall we go in? " asked her father. "I
was thinking of him too."

They knocked. There was no answer, so
they tried the door. It was bolted, but they
thought they heard him moving within.

"Nicholas! " said Margaret. There was
no answer, and they might have gone away,
believing the house to be empty, if there had
not been some accidental fall, as of a book,
within.

"Nicholas! " said Margaret, again. "It
is only us. Won't you let us come in?"

"No," said he. "I spoke as plain as I
could 'bout using words when I bolted th'
door. Let me be, this day."

Mr. Hale would have urged their desire,
but Margaret placed her finger on his lips.

"I don't wonder at it," said she. "I
myself long to be alone. It seems the only
thing to do one good after a day like this."

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SEVENTH.

HIGGINS'S door was locked the next day
when they went to pay their call on the
widow Boucher: but they learnt this time
from an officious neighbour, that he was
really from home. He had, however, been
in to see Mrs. Boucher before starting on his
day's business, whatever that was. It was
but an unsatisfactory visit to Mrs. Boucher;
she considered herself as an ill-used woman
by her poor husband's suicide; and there
was quite germ of truth enough in this idea
to make it a very difficult one to refute. Still
it was unsatisfactory to see how completely
her thoughts were turned upon herself and
her own position, and this selfishness extended
even to her relations with her children,
whom she considered as incumbrances, even
in the very midst of her somewhat animal
affection for them. Margaret tried to make
acquaintance with one or two of them, while
her father strove to raise the widow's
thoughts into some higher channel than that
of mere helpless querulousness. She found
that the children were truer and simpler
mourners than the widow. Daddy had been
a kind daddy to them; each could tell,
in their eager stammering way, of some
tenderness shown, some indulgence granted
by the lost father.

"Is yon thing upstairs really him; it
doesna look like him. I'm feared on it, and I
never was feared o' daddy."

Margaret's heart bled to hear that the
mother, in her selfish requirement of
sympathy, had taken her children upstairs to see
their disfigured father. It was intermingling
the coarseness of horror with the profoundness
of natural grief. She tried to turn
their thoughts in some other direction; on
what they could do for mother; on what—
for this was a more efficacious way of putting
it—what father would have wished them to
do. Margaret was more successful than Mr.
Hale in her efforts. The children seeing
their little duties lie in action close around
them, began to try each one to do something
that she suggested towards redding up
the slatternly room. But her father set too
high a standard, and too abstract a view,
before the indolent invalid. She could not
rouse her torpid mind into any vivid
imagination of what her husband's misery might
have been, before he had resorted to the last
terrible step; she could only look upon it as
it affected herself; she could not enter into
the enduring mercy of the God who had not
specially interposed to prevent the water
from drowning her prostrate husband; and,
although she was secretly blaming her
husband for having fallen into such drear
despair, and denying that he had any excuse for
his last rash act, she was inveterate in her
abuse of all who could by any possibility have
beeu supposed to have driven him to such
desperation. The masters—Mr. Thornton in
particular, whose mill had been attacked by
Boucher, and who, after the warrant had
been issued for his apprehension on the
charge of rioting, had caused it to be
withdrawn,—the Union, of which Higgins was
the representative to the poor woman,—the
children so numerous, so hungry, and so
noisy—all made up one great army of personal
enemies whose fault it was that she was now
a helpless widow.

Margaret heard enough of this unreasonableness
to dishearten her; and when they