“It will be Margaret Hall’s lad. Last summer, when it was so hot, there was no biding with the window shut at night, and theirs was open too: and many’s the time he has waked me with his moans; they say he’s been better sin’ cold weather came.” “Is he always in bed? Whatten ails him?” asked Libbie. “Summat’s amiss wi’ his backbone, folks say; he’s better and worse, like. He’s a nice little chap enough, and his mother’s not that bad either; only my mother and her had words, so now we don’t speak.” Libbie went on watching, and when she next spoke, to ask who and what his mother was, Anne Dixon was fast asleep. Time passed away, and as usual unveiled the hidden things. Libbie found out that Margaret Hall was a widow, who earned her living as a washerwoman; that the little suffering lad was her only child, her dearly beloved. That while she scolded, pretty nearly, everybody else, “till her name was up” in the neighbourhood for a termagant, to him she was evidently most tender and gentle. He lay alone on his little bed, near the window, through the day, while she was away toiling for a livelihood. But when Libbie had plain sewing to do at her lodgings, instead of going out to sew, she used to watch from her bedroom window for the time when the shadows opposite, by their mute gestures, told that the mother had returned to bend over her child, to smooth his pillow, to alter his position, to get him his nightly cup of tea. And often in the night Libbie could not help rising gently from bed, to see if the little arm was waving up and down, as was his accustomed habit when sleepless from pain. Libbie had a good deal of sewing to do at home that winter, and whenever it was not so cold as to benumb her fingers, she took it upstairs, in order to watch the little lad in her few odd moments of pause. On his better days he could sit up enough to peep out of his window, and she found he liked to look at her. Presently she ventured to nod to him across the court; and his faint smile, and ready nod back again, showed that this gave him pleasure. I think she would have been encouraged by this smile to have proceeded to a speaking acquaintance, if it had not been for his terrible mother, to whom it seemed to be irritation enough to know that Libbie was a lodger at the Dixons’ for her to talk at her whenever they encountered each other, and to live evidently in wait for some good opportunity of abuse.