’Sometimes in the afternoon, or at night.  Oh, there are plenty of churches; they grow as thick as mushrooms, and do about as much good.  Won’t you eat?’

The fare was not inviting; nevertheless, Gladys did her best to swallow a few morsels, because she really felt faint and weak.  It did not occur to the miser that he might kindle a cheerful spark of fire to give her a welcome, and to make her a cup of tea.  He was not less cold and hungry himself, it may be believed, but he had long inured himself to such privation, and bore it with an outward semblance of content.

When they had eaten, he busied himself getting an old rug and a pillow from the chest standing across one of the windows, and carried them into the other room, then he bade Gladys get quickly to bed, and not burn the candle too long.  He went in the dark himself, and when Gladys heard his footsteps growing fainter in the long passage a great terror took possession of her, the place was so strange, so cold, so unknown.  For some time she was even afraid to move, but at last she rose and crossed the floor to the windows, to see whether from them anything friendly or familiar could be seen.  But they looked into the street, and had thick iron bars across them, exactly like the windows of a gaol.  It was the last straw added to the burden of the unhappy child.  Her imagination did not lack in vividness, and a thousand unknown terrors rose up before her terrified eyes.  If only from the window she might have looked up to the eyes of the pitying stars, she had been less desolate, less forlorn.  A sharp sense of physical cold was the first thing to arouse her, and she took the candle and approached the bed.  Now, though they had ever been poor, the artist and his child had kept their surroundings clean and wholesome.  In her personal tastes Gladys was as fastidious as the highest lady in the land.  She turned down the covering, and when she saw the hue of the linen her lip curled, and she hastily covered it up from sight.  In the end, she laid herself down without undressing above the bed, spreading a clean handkerchief for her head to rest upon; and so, worn-out, she slept at last an untroubled and dreamless sleep, in which she forgot for many hours her forlorn and friendless state.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IV.

A RAY OF LIGHT.

Sunday was a dreary day.  It rained again, and the fog was so thick that it seemed dim twilight all day long in Gladys’s new home.  Her uncle did not go out at all, but dozed in the chimney-corner between the intervals of preparing the meagre meals.  On Sunday Abel Graham attended to his own housekeeping, and took care to keep a shilling off Mrs. Macintyre’s pittance for the same.  Gladys, though unaccustomed to perform household duties except of the slightest kind, was glad to occupy herself with them to make the time pass.  The old man from his corner watched with much approval the slender figure moving actively about the kitchen, the busy hands making order out of chaos, and adding the grace of her sweet young presence to that dreary place.  On the morrow, he told himself, he should dismiss the expensive Mrs. Macintyre.  Yes, he had made a good investment, and then the girl would always be there, a living creature, to whom he might talk when so disposed.