That was a very dismal night for Johnnie. They got home, and his things were taken off, and he returned to his toys. To see him playing in his forlorn way, all alone, with his little serious face was too much for Betty. But he got very tired of her caresses and attempts at consolation. The night passed on, and bed-time came, but his mother never came home. He sat and listened for the steps coming along the street, and dozed and woke up again, and felt as if all the world was empty round him, and only he and Betty left. He began to cry, but he felt as if he dared not make a noise, and sat with his little head in his hands trying to keep quiet, though now and then breaking out into sobs. ‘Oh, where was mamma? Why didn’t she come? Where was Susie? What had happened that they did not come home?’ And then the picture-books in the shop windows, and the great place full of people, who sat all silent under the light in those rows and rows of seats, and the little sugar-plums upon the bread and butter, all circled confusedly in his mind. And in the end he fell asleep, and was carried up to bed by Betty, and undressed without knowing it; but yet even in his sleep seemed to know and feel that there was nobody in the house but Betty and him. Nobody but the servant and the little boy! What a strange, miserable thing in a house that it should be left alone with only the servant and the little boy. Johnnie woke up suddenly out of his confused and broken sleep. His little bed was in the dressing-room that opened into his mother’s bedroom. He woke to hear a sound of crying and miserable voices, low and interrupted with tears. There was a light in his mother’s room, and he could see Susie moving about, taking off her outdoor dress, while mamma lay back in the easy-chair before the little fire, as if she had been taken ill. She lay there as if she could not move, till a sudden quick pang sprang up in the little boy’s heart, and a coldness as of ice crept over him, even in the warmth of his little bed. Could mamma, too, be going to die? Mamma _too_? He did not know at all what he meant, and yet he knew that something had happened which was more miserable than anything that ever had been before. He lay still, and gazed out from between the bars of his crib, and listened to the crying. That grown-up people should cry was dreadful to him. He wanted to get up and creep to his mother’s knee, and so at least belong to them, rather than be left out in this dreadful solitude: but he knew that if he did this they would immediately stop their talking, and tell each other that nothing must be said before the boy. So all that he could do was to lie still, and cry too, the silent tears dropping upon his little pillow, the sound of the low voices, too low to be intelligible, but not to betray the wretchedness that was in them, coming to him like sounds in a dream. Oh what a different scene from the other awakings, when, half peevish, half