The sick woman smiled sadly. She was very poor now, though it had not always been so; she might as well have hoped to buy the sun itself as woollen curtains--or cotton curtains either. Miss Betty knew that. "I'll think about it, Hester, and see if I've any old ones that I could let you have. I'm not sure; but I'll look," repeated she--and began to empty her capacious dimity pockets of a few items of good things she had brought. By-and-by, when she was a little cooler, and had talked with Hester, Miss Betty set off home again, her mind running upon the half-promised curtains. "They are properly shabby," thought she, as she went along, "but they'll serve to keep the sun and the wind off her." She was thinking of those warm green curtains that she had picked the braid from that past disastrous morning--as the reader heard of, and all the town as well. Nothing had been done with them since. Getting home, Miss Betty turned into the parlour. Susan--who had not yet found leisure to fix any time for her wedding--found her mistress fanning her hot face, her bonnet untied and tilted back. "I've been to see that poor Hester Knowles, Susan," began Miss Betty. "Law, ma'am!" interposed Susan. "What a walk for you this scorching afternoon! All up that wide New Road!" "You may well say that, girl: but I went Turkey away. She's very ill, poor thing; and that's a frightfully staring window of hers, the sun on it like a blazing fire, and not as much as a rag for a blind; and the window don't fit, she says, and in cold weather the biting wind comes in and shivers her up. I think I might give her those shabby old curtains, Susan--that were up in Mr. Philip's room, you know, before we got the new chintz ones in." "So you might, ma'am," said Susan, who was not a bad-hearted girl, excepting to the baker's man. "They can't go up at any of our windows as they be; and if you had 'em dyed, I don't know as they'd answer much, being so shabby." "I put them--let me see--into the spare ottoman, didn't I? Yes, that was it. And there I suppose they must be lying still." "Sure enough, Miss Betty," said Susan. "I've not touched 'em." "Nor I," said Miss Betty. "With all the trouble that got into our house at that time, I couldn't give my mind to seeing after the old things, and I've not thought about them since. Come upstairs with me now, Susan; we'll see what sort of a state they are in." They went up; and Miss Betty took off her bonnet and cloak and put her cap on. The spare ottoman, soft, and red, and ancient, used as a receptacle for odds and ends that were not wanted, stood in a spacious linen-closet on the first-floor landing. It was built out over the back-door, and had a skylight above. Susan threw back the lid of the ottoman, and Miss Betty stood by. The faded old brown curtains, green once, lay in a heap at one end, just as Miss Betty had hastily flung them in that past day in March, when on her way to look at the chintzes.