It was the hour before dawn—­the dark hour when minutes walk with leaden feet and the departing vapours of night lay chilliest finger on the sick and dying, and on those who watch at their side.  From the mantelshelf the lamp emitted its feeble rays, dimly lighting the lonely chamber, and holding, as with uncertain hand, the shadows which crowded and cowered in the distant corners and recesses of the room, and throwing into Rembrandtesque the pallid face of the wakeful mother, and the flushed and fevered face of the slumbering child.  The little watch beat bravely to the march of time, eager to keep pace with that never-flagging runner; while the quick and feeble breathing of the girl told how she was fast losing in the race with the all-omnipotent hours.  On a small table stood two phials, in which were imprisoned dull-coloured liquids, powerless, despite their supposed potency, to stay the hunger of the disease so rapidly consuming the patient; and by their side was a plate of shrivelled fruit, the departing lusciousness of which had failed to tempt an appetite in her whose mouth was baked with the fever that fed on its own flame.  There, gathered into a few cubic feet of space, met the great triune mystery of night, of suffering, of sin—­the unfathomable problems of the universe; there God, the soul, and destiny, together and in silence, played out their terribly real parts.

As Mrs. Stott looked at her daughter tossing in restless sleep, the natal hour came back to her, and in memory she again travailed in birth.  She recalled the joy of the advent of that life now so fast departing, and tried to say, ’The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’  The words died on her lips.  Had it been a blessed thing on the part of God to give to her a child who brought disgrace on her family name?  And now that her child was restored, with a possibility of redeeming the past, was it a blessed thing of God to take her?  As these hideous thoughts chased one another through her over-wrought mind, they seemed to embody themselves in the terrible shadows that leapt and fought like demons on the wall, mere mockeries of her helplessness and despair.

Her eye, however, fell on the Bible, and taking it up and opening it at random, she read, ’Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem.  O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’  Hurriedly turning over the leaves, her eyes again fell upon words that went like goads into her heart:  ’Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day, because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb.’

‘What!’ cried she, the old Calvinist life reasserting itself in her soul—­’what! have the curses o’ God getten howd o’ me?’

* * * * *

‘Mother!’