Strangely moved and grateful, Myles silently clasped the noble old man’s hand. He could not speak. Canon Ponsonby showed him out by a side-door, so that he avoided that dreadful crowd round the entrance. He was in the street again, with the white ticket, and some money in his hand. After what Canon Ponsonby had said to him, he had ceased to feel that dreadful agony of shame, but he felt utterly crushed, and reduced to the most perfect insignificance. Dreamily pursuing his homeward way, he turned over the money in his hand, and remembered that he must buy some food with it! Food! for himself? When he had gone through that age of anguish, as it had seemed to him, he should take the coins which had been so hardly earned, and buy bread with them, and eat them? It struck him as being absurd--as if one had used a steam-hammer to crush a midge withal. Nevertheless, he went into a shop, and bought some bread and cheese, and was carrying it home, still with the same sense of incongruity between the means and the end. But, as he passed a doorstep, at the end of a street, he beheld a little girl sitting on it, and crying bitterly. ‘Little one, what’s the matter?’ he asked, stopping, and looking down at her. ‘I’m--so--hungry!’ said the child, with a sob between each word, as she looked piteously up into his face, and held a thin little pinafore, soaked with tears, in two small, tremulous hands. ‘So hungry!’ he said, stooping over her, with the sense that perhaps, after all, he had not gone through the furnace to find nothing at the other side. ‘Hast had no breakfast?’ ‘Nay, none at o’.’ ‘How’s that?’ Here a thin, clean-looking, poorly clad woman, with a baby in her arms, came to the door. ‘Come in, Sarah Emily,’ said she. ‘For shame o’ thisel, to sit bawlin’ on th’ dur-step. Thi’ feyther’s gone to see about summat to ayt. Coom in, and hold thi’ din.’ ‘I’m--so--hungry!’ was the only answer. ‘Ne’er heed her, lad!’ said the woman to Myles. ‘My measter’s going to th’ committee to-day. We’ve had to come to that, and we’ll likely get summat to ayt afore neet.’ ‘Nay, but it’s very hard for such a bit of a lass to wait so long,’ said Myles. ‘If you’ll trust her to me, I’ll give her some breakfast. I’m just going to get my own.’ ‘Eh, thank you, you’re very kind,’ said the woman, her voice suddenly breaking, as she looked at him, and then turned aside again. ‘Come, my lass!’ said Myles gently, and he took the open-mouthed Sarah Emily in his arms, and carried her to his home. In the kitchen, he seated her in Mary’s rocking-chair, explaining briefly to his sister that the child was clemming, and must be fed, and then he cut her some bread and cheese, and watched her with an intense and altogether unaccountable interest while she ate it. He felt almost light-hearted. If he had not, so to speak, walked up to the cannon’s mouth this morning, little Sarah Emily might have been sickening with hunger until eventide.