“We must sell our furniture, mother!”

“For a quarter of what it’s worth?  Never, girl!  No!  The Lord will provide,” said she, between her clenched teeth, with a sort of hysteric chuckle.  “The Lord will provide!”

“I believe it; I believe it,” said poor Grace; “but faith is weak, and the day is very dark, mother.”

“Dark, ay?  And may be darker, yet; but the Lord will provide.  He prepares a table in the wilderness for his saints that the world don’t think of.”

“Oh, mother! and do you think there is any door of hope?”

“Go to bed, girl; go to bed, and leave me to see to that.  Find my spectacles.  Wherever have you laid them to, now?  I’ll look over the books awhile.”

“Do let me go over them for you.”

“No, you sha’n’t!  I suppose you’ll be wanting to make out your poor old mother’s been cheating somebody.  Why not, if I’m a thief, Miss, eh?”

“Oh, mother! mother! don’t say that again.”

And Grace glided out meekly to her own chamber, which was on the ground-floor adjoining the parlour, and there spent more than one hour in prayer, from which no present comfort seemed to come; yet who shall say that it was all unanswered?

At last her mother came upstairs, and put her head in angrily:—­“Why ben’t you in bed, girl? sitting up this way?”

“I was praying, mother,” says Grace, looking up as she knelt.

“Praying!  What’s the use of praying? and who’ll hear you if you pray?  What you want’s a husband, to keep you out of the workhouse; and you won’t get that by kneeling here.  Get to bed, I say, or I’ll pull you up?”

Grace obeyed uncomplaining, but utterly shocked; though she was not unacquainted with those frightful fits of morose unbelief, even of fierce blasphemy, to which the excitable West-country mind is liable, after having been over-strained by superstitious self-inspection, and by the desperate attempt to prove itself right and safe from frames and feelings, while fact and conscience proclaim it wrong.

The West-country people are apt to attribute these paroxysms to the possession of a devil; and so did Grace that night.

Trembling with terror and loving pity, she lay down, and began to pray afresh for that poor wild mother.

At last the fear crossed her that her mother might make away with herself.  But a few years before, another class-leader in Aberalva had attempted to do so, and had all but succeeded.  The thought was intolerable.  She must go to her; face reproaches, blows, anything.  She rose from her bed, and went to the door.  It was fastened on the outside.

A cold perspiration stood on her forehead.  She opened her lips to shriek to her mother:  but checked herself when she heard her stirring gently in the outer room.  Her pulses throbbed too loudly at first for her to hear distinctly:  but she felt that it was no moment for giving way to emotion; by a strong effort of will, she conquered herself; and then, with that preternatural acuteness of sense which some women possess, she could hear everything her mother was doing.  She heard her put on her shawl, her bonnet; she heard her open the front door gently.  It was now long past midnight.  Whither could she be going at that hour?