“There is no bread, Willy,” said Eva, speaking for the first time.  “Don’t ask for any bread.  It makes mamma sad.”

The child opened his large blue eyes enquiringly upon his sister.

“My sweet, darling child,” exclaimed Mrs. Wentworth, clasping the little Ella to her heart, and then bursting into tears at this proof of her child’s fortitude, she continued:  “Are you not hungry, too?”

“Yes, mother,” she replied, “but”—­Here the little girl ceased to speak as if desirous of sparing her mother pain.

“But what?” asked Mrs. Wentworth.

“Mother,” exclaimed the child, throwing her arms round her mother’s neck, and evading the question, “father will come back to us, and then we will not want bread.”

The word “father,” brought to Mrs. Wentworth’s mind her absent husband.  She thought of the agony he would endure if he knew that his wife and children were suffering for food.  A swelling of her bosom told of the emotion raging within her, and again the tears started to her eyes.

“Come, my sweet boy,” she said, dashing away the tears, as they came like dewdrops from her eyelids, and speaking to the infant on her knee, “it is time to go to bed.”

“Aint I to get some bread before I go to bed?” he asked.

“There is none, darling,” she answered hastily.  “Wait until to-morrow and you will get some.”

“But I am so hungry,” again repeated the child, and again a pang of wretchedness shot through the mother’s breast.

“Never mind,” she observed, kissing him fondly, “if you love me, let me put you to bed like a good child.”

“I love you!” he said, looking up into her eyes with all that deep love that instinct gives to children.

She undressed and put him to bed, where the little Ella followed him soon after.  Mrs. Wentworth sat by the bedside until they had fallen asleep.

“I love you, mother, but I am so hungry,” were the last words the infant murmured as he closed his eyes in sleep, and in that slumber forgot his agonizing pangs for awhile.

As soon as they were asleep, Mrs. Wentworth removed from the bedside and seated herself at the window, which she opened.  There she sat, looking at the clouds as they floated by, dark as her own prospects were.  The morning dawned and saw her still there.  It was a beautiful morning, but the warble of the bird in a tree near by, as he poured forth his morning song, awoke no echo in the heart of the soldier’s wife.  All was cheerless within her.  The brightness of the morning only acted like a gleam of light at the mouth of a cavern.  It made the darkness of her thoughts more dismal.

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.

THE APPEAL FOR CREDIT