In truth, the mother’s sorrow was very terrible; so engrossing, that it nearly deadened all desire to ascertain the particulars of another human being’s life; besides which, there was a mystery about Bessie—a mystery Heather, in the midst of her grief, intuitively felt chary of intruding on. She wished no one to hear of her return; she came at night to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and was admitted privily by Tifford, whom probably she had bribed to secrecy, for none of the other servants ever heard of her visits. She wore a ring, a golden wedding-ring, and yet her face was not the face of a happy woman. She volunteered no particulars of the events which had intervened between the time when she stole away from the Hollow like a thief in the night, till she returned to see Lally before she died. She was sweeter than of old, but she was also sadder, and her beauty, neither dimmed nor diminished, was yet changed. All these things Mrs. Dudley beholding, even through her tears, might have marvelled at, though she never inquired into them, until one day there arrived a note from Bessie, saying, “I can tell you no more, dear Heather, unless you will visit me. Come to me once, at all events; I want to speak to you, and I want to show you something.” Dressed in her deep mourning, Heather repaired to the address given—a first floor in Roscommon Street, Pentonville. What a mean street it was—what small, close rooms that pretty Bessie had selected; and yet, when Heather came to sit down beside the fire, with her old friend’s hand clasping hers, she forgot all the words of remonstrance she had intended to speak, and listened to Bessie’s sorrowful apologies. “It is not exactly the kind of parlour I should have liked to ask you to spend a day in, Heather,” she said; “but beggars, you know, cannot be choosers; and I wanted to talk to you so much—so much—and to show you something, if you do not mind.” “If I do not mind!” Heather repeated, wonderingly. “Yes, sweet—my child!” and, with the colour mantling in her cheeks, Bessie went into the next room, her bedchamber, and brought thence a baby—a great, staring, fat baby—with pink feet, and arms that looked as though cord had been tied tightly round the wrists, so deep were the rolls and wrinkles of flesh, so high the mountains and so deep the intermediate valley. Is it necessary for me to describe what followed during the course of the next ten minutes? What woman is there who does not know exactly how Heather took the little fatuous-looking lump of mortality to her heart and cried over it; who cannot conceive how Bessie, sitting on a low stool, gazed at the meaningless features of her child, which cooed and clung to Heather, and dabbed its fists in her face, and crowed with delight at the sweet eyes bent upon it, and kicked in an ecstasy of infantile excitement at all the notice “mamma’s company” was taking of mamma’s autocrat.