Perhaps her father had had a hint, and she was his great pet, so he took care that the apprentices should not suspect that Amy had been "upset." So he began to tell what had made him late at home. He had overtaken poor Widow Smithers in much trouble, for she had had a note from the hospital to say that her little boy, Edwin, must be discharged as incurable. It was a hip complaint, and he could not walk, and she had not been able to find any way of getting him home. It so happened that all the gentlefolks were out for the day, and she did not get her letter in time before the market people set off. She was indeed too poor to hire a conveyance, and was going in, fearing that she might have to carry this nine-year-old boy herself five miles unless she could get a lift. So Mr. Lee had driven her into the town, and after doing his work there, had come up to the hospital, and had taken her in with poor little Edwin, who was laid on a shawl in the cart, but cried a good deal at the jolting. The doctors said that they could do no more for the poor little fellow, and she would have to take him home and do the best she could for him. It fell very hard upon her, poor woman, for she was obliged to go out to work every day, since she had four children, and only Harry, the one who was older then Edwin, earned anything--and indeed he only got three shillings a week for minding some cows on the common. The two girls _must_ go to school, and indeed they were too young to be of much use and the boy would have to be left alone all day, except for the dinner hour, as he had been before the hospital had been tried for him. "There, Amy," said Aunt Charlotte, as they were clearing away the dinner things after the menfolk had gone out, "there's something you could do. It would be a real kindness to go in and see after that poor little man." "Yes," added Rose; "you might run in at dinner time, and I'd spare you a little time then, and you might read to him, and cheer him up--yes, and teach him a bit too." "Edwin Smithers was always a very tiresome, stupid little boy," said Amy, rather crossly, from her infant school recollections. "Then he will want help all the more," said Aunt Rose, and it sounded almost like mimicry of what Amy had said of old Mrs. Long. She did not like it at all. It is the devices of our own heart that we prefer to follow, whether for good or harm, and specially when we think them good. And yet we specially pray that we may do all such good works as our Lord hath _prepared for us to walk in_, as if we were to rejoice in having our opportunities set out before us, yet the teaching a dull little boy of whom she had had experience in the infant school, did not seem to her half such interesting work as converting an old woman of whom strange things were said. However, Amy was on the whole a good girl, though she had her little tempers, and did not guard against them as she ought, thinking that what was soon over did not signify.