When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for some minutes.  So did Mary.  In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the boy’s eyes unclose.  He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother and the figures beside her.  Then suddenly the gaze became eager, concrete; he sought for something.  Her eye followed his, and she perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned.  She stooped noiselessly and moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better.  The child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures—­his little, all—­with just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had fascinated Wharton.  Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could have wept.

At last the rector and his sister rose.

“God be with you, Mrs. Hurd,” said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; “God support you!”

His voice trembled.  Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.

“Oh, Mr. Harden!” she cried with a sudden wail.  “Mr. Harden!”

Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with quivering lips of “the dear Lord, the Saviour.”

The rector turned to Marcella.

“You are staying the night with her?” he asked, under his breath.

“Yes.  Mrs. Mullins was up all last night.  I offered to come to-night.”

“You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see Hurd?”

“For a very few minutes.”

“Did you hear anything of his state of mind?” he asked anxiously.  “Is he penitent?”

“He talked to me of Willie,” she said—­a fierce humanness in her unfriendly eyes.  “I promised him that when the child died, he should be buried respectably—­not by the parish.  And I told him I would always look after the little girls.”

The rector sighed.  He moved away.  Then unexpectedly he came back again.

“I must say it to you,” he said firmly, but still so low as not to be heard by any one else in the cottage.  “You are taking a great responsibility here to-night.  Let me implore you not to fill that poor woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her life.  That you feel bitterly, I know.  Mary has explained to me—­but ask yourself, I beg of you!—­how is she to be helped through her misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission to the will of God?”

He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.

“You must leave me to do what I think best,” said Marcella, coldly.  She felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her.  That hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell once for all.