The morning wore on. Theresa went out again; Karl was shut up and then he went out; Lucy was left in the house alone. It was usually so. She had given her orders, and no earthly thing else remained to do--save let her heart prey upon itself. When she had gone pretty nearly out of her mind, she put her bonnet on, and betook herself to Mrs. Whittle, the widow of the man who had died suddenly at the station in the summer. Passing out at the extreme gate of the Court, Lucy had but to skirt the wood, and in three minutes was at the cottage: one of a row. She had taken to come here when she was very particularly miserable--as she felt this day. For the lesson it read to her was most salutary, acting as a kind of tonic. That this poor woman was slowly dying, there could not be much doubt of. She had been in ill health before her husband's death, and the blow struck too severely on the weakened frame. But for Karl and his wife the family must have taken refuge in the workhouse. Lucy went in and sat down on a low wooden stool. Mrs. Whittle, about to-day, was in the easy-chair, sent to her from the Court, her three little girls around her, the eldest eight years of age. Two younger children, boys, played on the floor. "I am teaching them to sew, ma'am," she said to Lucy. "Bessy has got her hand pretty well into it; but the other two haven't. When I lie awake at nights, my lady, and think how little it is they know of any sort of labour yet, and how soon I may be taken from them, and be able to teach no more, my heart fails me. I can only set on to cry, and to pray God to forgive me all my short-comings." The tears had come into her eyes, and were falling down her hectic cheeks. She had been very pretty once, but the face was wasted now. Lucy's eyelashes were wet. "But I think you look better, Mrs. Whittle. And as to short-comings--we all might own to those." "It seems to me that I could have brought them on better if I'd known what was coming, ma'am. Until that night when my husband was carried home on a shutter, I had not had a thought of death, as being likely to concern any of us at home here. And now the time seems to be coming to an end, and I'm leaving them, and they know nothing." "I hope you will get better yet," said Lucy. "I don't think so, ma'am. I should like to if I could. The very distress that is upon me about my children seems as if it kept me back. Nobody can know what it is to leave a family of young children to the world, till they come to it themselves. There's a dreadful yearning upon me always, my lady, an aching like, at the thought of it. Mr. Sumnor, he is very good and kind, and he comes here, and tells me about heaven, and how free from care I shall be, once I get to it. But oh, ma'am, when I must leave these little ones here, with nobody to say a word to keep them from the world's bad ways, how do I know that _they_ will ever get to heaven?"