She stood with wild glaring eyes by the bedside, never looking at Susan, but hungrily gazing at the little white still child. She stooped down, and put her hand tight on her own heart, as if to still its beating, and bent her ear to the pale lips. Whatever the result was, she did not speak; but threw off the bed-clothes wherewith Susan had tenderly covered up the little creature, and felt its left side. Then she threw up her arms with a cry of wild despair. ‘She is dead! she is dead!’ She looked so fierce, so mad, so haggard, that for an instant Susan was terrified—the next, the holy God had put courage into her heart, and her pure arms were round that guilty wretched creature, and her tears were falling fast and warm upon her breast. But she was thrown off with violence. ‘You killed her—you slighted her—you let her fall down those stairs! you killed her!’ Susan cleared off the thick mist before her, and gazing at the mother with her clear, sweet, angel-eyes, said mournfully— ‘I would have laid down my own life for her.’ ‘Oh, the murder is on my soul!’ exclaimed the wild bereaved mother, with the fierce impetuosity of one who has none to love her and to be beloved, regard to whom might teach self-restraint. ‘Hush!’ said Susan, her finger on her lips. ‘Here is the doctor. God may suffer her to live.’ The poor mother turned sharp round. The doctor mounted the stair. Ah! that mother was right; the little child was really dead and gone. And when he confirmed her judgment, the mother fell down in a fit. Susan, with her deep grief, had to forget herself, and forget her darling (her charge for years), and question the doctor what she must do with the poor wretch, who lay on the floor in such extreme of misery. ‘She is the mother!’ said she. ‘Why did not she take better care of her child?’ asked he, almost angrily. But Susan only said, ‘The little child slept with me; and it was I that left her.’ ‘I will go back and make up a composing draught; and while I am away you must get her to bed.’ Susan took out some of her own clothes, and softly undressed the stiff, powerless, form. There was no other bed in the house but the one in which her father slept. So she tenderly lifted the body of her darling; and was going to take it down stairs, but the mother opened her eyes, and seeing what she was about, she said, ‘I am not worthy to touch her, I am so wicked; I have spoken to you as I never should have spoken; but I think you are very good; may I have my own child to lie in my arms for a little while?’ Her voice was so strange a contrast to what it had been before she had gone into the fit that Susan hardly recognised it; it was now so unspeakably soft, so irresistibly pleading, the features too had lost their fierce expression, and were almost as placid as death. Susan could not speak, but she carried the little child, and laid it in its mother’s arms; then as she looked at them, something overpowered her, and she knelt down, crying aloud,