Through the western streets, roaring with carriages, crowded with foot passengers--like one in a dream--past the theatres, and the arches, and all the great, rich world, busy seeking its afternoon pleasure, through the long suburbs, getting more scattered as she went on, and so out on to the dusty broad western highway; a lonely wanderer, with only one thought in her throbbing head, to reach such home as was left her, before she died. At the first quiet spot she came to she sat down and forced herself to think. Two hundred miles to go, and fifteen shillings to keep her. Never mind, she could beg; she had heard that some made a trade of begging, and did well; hard if she should die on the road. So she pushed on through the evening toward the sinking sun, till the milestones passed slower and slower, and then she found shelter in a tramps' lodging-house, and got what rest she could. In a week she was at Taunton. Then the weather, which had hitherto been fair and pleasant, broke up, and still she held on, with the rain beating from the westward in her face, as though to stay her from her refuge, dizzy and confused, but determined still, along the miry high-road. She had learnt from a gipsy woman, with whom she had walked in company for some hours, how to carry her child across her back, slung in her shawl. So, with her breast bare to the storm, she fought her way over the high bleak downs, glad and happy when the boy ceased his wailing, and lay warm and sheltered behind her, swathed in every poor rag she could spare from her numbed and dripping body. Late on a wild rainy night she reached Exeter, utterly penniless, and wet to the skin. She had had nothing to eat since noon, and her breast was failing from want of nourishment and over-exertion. Still it was only twenty miles further. Surely, she thought, God had not saved her through two hundred such miles, to perish at last. The child was dry and warm, and fast asleep, if she could get some rest in one of the doorways in the lower part of the town, till she was stronger she could fight her way on to Drumston; so she held on to St. Thomas's, and finding an archway drier than the others sat down, and took the child upon her lap. Rest!--rest was a fiction; she was better walking--such aches, and cramps, and pains in every joint! She would get up and push on, and yet minute after minute went by, and she could not summon courage. She was sitting with her beautiful face in the light of a lamp. A woman well and handsomely dressed was passing rapidly through the rain, but on seeing her stopped and said:-- "My poor girl, why do you sit there in the damp entry, such a night as this?" "I am cold, hungry, ruined; that's why I sit under the arch," replied Mary, rising up. "Come home with me," said the woman; "I will take care of you." "I am going to my friends," replied she. "Are you sure they will be glad to see you, my dear," said the woman, "with that pretty little pledge at your bosom?"