Chapter 24 - Page 2

was his, that there's no getting off her word now. Poor body; she takes it very hard, I dare say!"

*Nobbut; none-but. "No man sigh evere God no but the oon bigetun sone."--Wickliffe's Version.

Mrs. Wilson had waited patiently while this whispered speech was being uttered, imagining, perhaps, that it would end in some explanation addressed to her. But when both were silent, though their eyes, without speech or language, told their hearts' pity, she spoke again in the same unaltered gentle voice (so different from the irritable impatience she had been ever apt to show to everyone except her husband--he who had wedded her, broken-down and injured),--in a voice so different, I say, from the old, hasty manner, she spoke now the same anxious words--

"What is this? Will you tell me?"

"Yo'd better give it me at once, Mrs. Wilson, and let me put it out of your sight. Speak to her, Mary, wench, and ask for a sight on it; I've tried and better-tried to get it from her, and she takes no heed of words, and I'm loth to pull it by force out of her hands."

Mary drew the little "cricket"* out from under the dresser, and sat down at Mrs. Wilson's knee, and, coaxing one of her tremulous ever-moving hands into hers, began to rub it soothingly; there was a little resistance--a very little, but that was all; and presently, in the nervous movement of the imprisoned hand, the parchment fell to the ground.

*Cricket; a stool.

Mary calmly and openly picked it up, without any attempt at concealment, and quietly placing it in sight of the anxious eyes that followed it with a kind of spell-bound dread, went on with her soothing caresses.

"She has had no sleep for many nights," said the girl to Mrs. Davenport, "and all this woe and sorrow,--it's no wonder."

"No, indeed!" Mrs. Davenport answered.

"We must get her fairly to bed; we must get her undressed, and all; and trust to God in His mercy to send her to sleep, or else"--

For, you see, they spoke before her as if she were not there; her heart was so far away.

Accordingly they almost lifted her from the chair, in which she sat motionless, and taking her up as gently as a mother carries her sleeping baby, they undressed her poor, worn form, and laid her in the little bed upstairs. They had once thought of placing her in Jem's bed, to be out of sight or sound of any disturbance of Alice's; but then again they remembered the shock she might receive in awakening in so unusual a place, and also that Mary, who intended to keep vigil that night in the house of mourning, would find it difficult to divide her attention in the possible cases that might ensue.

So they laid her, as I said before, on that little pallet bed; and, as they were slowly withdrawing from the bedside, hoping and praying that she might sleep, and forget for a time her heavy burden, she looked wistfully after Mary, and