With an intense longing for pure air and open country, they toiled slowly on, the child walking with extreme difficulty, for the pains that racked her joints were of no common severity, and every exertion increased them.  But they wrung from her no complaint, as the two proceeded slowly on, clearing the town in course of time.  They slept that night with nothing between them and the sky, amid the horrors of a manufacturing suburb, and who shall tell the terrors of that night to the young wandering child.

And yet she had no fear for herself, for she was past it, but put up a prayer for the old man.  A penny loaf was all that they had had that day.  It was very little, but even hunger was forgotten in the strange tranquillity that crept over her senses.  So very weak and spent she felt as she lay down, so very calm and unresisting, that she had no thought of any wants of her own, but prayed that God would raise up some friend for him.  Morning came—­much weaker, yet the child made no complaint—­she felt a hopelessness of their ever being extricated together from that forlorn place; a dull conviction that she was very ill, perhaps dying; but no fear or anxiety.  Objects appeared more dim, the noise less, the path more uneven, for sometimes she stumbled, and became roused, as it were, in the effort to prevent herself from falling.  Poor child!  The cause was in her tottering feet.

They were dragging themselves along toward evening and the child felt that the time was close at hand when she could bear no more.  Before them she saw a traveller reading from a book which he carried.

It was not an easy matter to come up with him, and beseech his aid, for he walked fast.  At length he stopped, to look more attentively at some passage in his book.  Animated with a ray of hope, the child shot on before her grandfather, and going close to the stranger without rousing him by the sound of her footsteps, began faintly to implore his help.

He turned his head.  Nell clapped her hands together, uttered a wild shriek, and fell senseless at his feet.  It was no other than the poor schoolmaster.  Scarcely less moved and surprised than the child herself, he stood for a moment, silent and confounded by the unexpected apparition, without even presence of mind to raise her from the ground.  But, quickly recovering his self-possession, and dropping on one knee beside her, he endeavored to restore her to herself.

“She is quite exhausted,” he said, glancing upward into the old man’s face.  “You have taxed her powers too far, friend.”

“She is perishing of want,” rejoined the old man.  “I never thought how weak and ill she was, till now.”

Casting a look upon him, half-reproachful and half-compassionate, the schoolmaster took the child in his arms, and bore her away at his utmost speed to a small inn within sight.