In the meantime Hetty had been left at Amber Hill in the care of the housekeeper, for Mr. Enderby would not allow his wife to carry her off to Wavertree.

“It would be a mistake,” he said, “to begin what we may not think proper to go on with afterwards.  If the child comes home with us now she may feel herself aggrieved, later, at being sent away.  To act with prudence is our first duty towards her.”

So Hetty had been left with the housekeeper, who, being a kind woman in her way, tried to comfort her with cakes and jam.  Her only real comfort was her darling Scamp, and with her arms round his shaggy neck she shed many a tear of loneliness and terror.  Her heart was full of anxious fears as to what was going to become of her.

She had stolen into the room where the dead woman lay to take her last farewell of her benefactress.  Nobody watched there, and Hetty easily found an opportunity for paying her tearful visit.  Scamp, who never left her side, accompanied her with a sad solemnity in his countenance, and these were perhaps the two most real mourners whom the wealthy lady had left behind her.

Now all was over, and Mrs. Rushton’s room looked vacant and with as little sign of her presence as if she had never inhabited it.  The wintry sunshine smiled in at all the windows of her handsome house, and made it cheerful even though the blinds were drawn down.  The robins twittered in the evergreens outside, and the maids had their little jokes as usual over their sewing, though they spoke in lowered tones.  No great and terrible change seemed to have happened to any one but Hetty, except indeed to Scamp, and it was plain that he suffered only for Hetty’s sake.

On the day when Mrs. Rushton’s relations met at Amber Hill Hetty sat in the housekeeper’s room in a little straw chair at the fire, with Scamp clasped in her arms and her head resting against his.  She felt instinctively that her fate was being sealed upstairs.  Indeed a few words which had passed between Grant and the housekeeper, and which she had accidentally overheard, assured her that such would be the case.

“If Mrs. Rushton has left her nothing,” said Grant, “she’ll be out on the world again, as she was before.  Mrs. Kane may take her, unless the gentlemen do something for her.”

“Mr. Enderby will never allow her to go back to poor Anne Kane,” said the housekeeper.  “There’s many a cheap way of providing for a friendless child, and it wouldn’t be fair to put her on a woman that can hardly keep her own little home together.”

Hetty’s anguish was unspeakable as these words sank into her heart, each one making a wound.  She shuddered at the thought of going back to Mrs. Kane, but felt even more horror of those unknown “cheap ways of providing for a friendless child,” alluded to by the housekeeper.  A perfect sea of tribulation rolled over her head as she bent it in despair, and wept forlornly on Scamp’s comfortable neck.