who was accompanied in all her wanderings by a fragile infant, which she seemed to carry with especial care and tenderness.  Sometimes, too, in the bleak afternoons, she would be seen wending her way through mud and mire, setting her weary face against the bitter east wind, and patiently singing on; and motherly women, coming from the gay shops and stores, where they had been purchasing Christmas toys for their own children, would often stop to look at the baby’s pinched, white features with pity, and would say, while giving their spare pennies, “Poor little thing!  Is it not very ill?” And Liz, her heart freezing with sudden terror, would exclaim, hurriedly, “Oh, no, no!  It is always pale; it is just a little bit weak, that’s all!” And the kindly questioners, touched by the large despair of her dark eyes, would pass on and say no more.  And Christmas came—­the birthday of the Child Christ—­a feast the sacred meaning of which was unknown to Liz; she only recognized it as a sort of large and somewhat dull bank-holiday, when all London devoted itself to church-going and the eating of roast beef and plum-pudding.  The whole thing was incomprehensible to her mind, but even her sad countenance was brighter than usual on Christmas eve, and she felt almost gay, for had she not, by means of a little extra starvation on her own part, been able to buy a wondrous gold-and-crimson worsted bird suspended from an elastic string, a bird which bobbed up and down to command in the most lively and artistic manner?  And had not her hired baby actually laughed at the clumsy toy—­laughed an elfish and weird laugh, the first it had ever indulged in?  And Liz had laughed too, for pure gladness in the child’s mirth, and the worsted bird became a sort of uncouth charm to make them both merry.

But after Christmas had come and gone, and the melancholy days, the last beating of the failing pulse of the Old Year, throbbed slowly and heavily away, the baby took upon its wan visage a strange expression—­the solemn expression of worn-out and suffering age.  Its blue eyes grew more solemnly speculative and dreamy, and after a while it seemed to lose all taste for the petty things of this world and the low desires of mere humanity.  It lay very quiet in Liz’s arms; it never cried, and was no longer fretful, and it seemed to listen with a sort of mild approval to the tones of her voice as they rang out in the dreary streets, through which, by day and night, she patiently wandered.  By-and-by the worsted bird, too, fell out of favour; it jumped and glittered in vain; the baby surveyed it with an unmoved air of superior wisdom, just as if it had suddenly found out what real birds were like, and was not to be deceived into accepting so poor an imitation of nature.  Liz grew uneasy, but she had no one in whom to confide her fears.  She had been very regular in her payments to Mother Mawks, and that irate lady, kept in order by her bull-dog of a husband, had been of late very contented to let