‘He is not; but it is not your fault that he still lives. And what terrible results may follow this unnatural fall, no one knows. I told you what your habits would lead to. You have the consolation of knowing that you have injured, and perhaps killed, your favourite child by your fatal indulgence.’ ‘No! not killed--not _killed_--’ he repeated hoarsely, ‘it is impossible. God cannot have so little mercy.’ ‘Mercy!’ cried Hannah, shrilly, for the accident to her baby had dried up, for the time being, every drop of the milk of human kindness in her, ‘what mercy have you a right to expect at His hand--_you_, who showed none? You are not satisfied with making _one_ mother childless. You must try and take the only joy left in my wretched life from me. You deprived me of the society of my girls, and now you want to murder my boy.’ She had used the word inadvertently, but it stabbed the unfortunate man before her to the heart. He glared wildly at her for a minute, and then, with a low cry like the protest of a wounded animal, he slammed the door between them, and locked it on the other side. Hannah had a bolt on hers, and she rose at once and drew it. She felt she could not endure his presence again that night. So she sat by Wally’s side, and watched his feverish slumbers alone till daylight. CHAPTER IV. Doctor Sewell’s report, the next morning, was not entirely satisfactory. It was true that Wally was quite conscious, and had eaten a good breakfast, but he cried when he was moved, and did not seem to wish to get up, which was so far fortunate, because the medical man strictly forbade his doing so. But it made Hannah very uneasy, since it plainly denoted that he had sustained more injury than was outwardly apparent. She did not see her husband all the day, during which he kept strictly to his own room, and she was glad of it, for she felt that she could not have spoken to him as she ought. She was already ashamed of her outburst of the day before, but did not feel as if she could speak much differently even now. For, as she sat by Wally’s side, trying to soothe his fretfulness under pain, her thoughts would revert to sweet, beautiful Jenny, struck down through the same hand. Was this really a judgment on her husband for his unconfessed crime? Was _his_ child to be taken from him, in the same way and by the same hand that had made other parents, as loving as himself, childless? But it was hard on her--very, very hard, that she should suffer, through her little son, for his father’s sins. Hannah sat by the baby’s side, thinking these sad thoughts throughout the day, and when night fell, and Wally was asleep, she wrestled with Heaven in prayer that the cup might pass away from her. Yet she knew, even while she prayed, that it is part of the world’s plan that the innocent shall suffer for the guilty, and often more than they suffer themselves.