“Could she speak!  Oh, if God—­if I might but have heard her little voice!  Mother, I used to dream of it.  May I see her once again?  Oh, mother, if I strive very hard and God is very merciful, and I go to heaven, I shall not know her—­I shall not know my own again:  she will shun me as a stranger, and chug to Susan Palmer and to you.  Oh, woe!  Oh, woe!” She shook with exceeding sorrow.

In her earnestness of speech she had uncovered her face, and tried to read Mrs. Leigh’s thoughts through her looks.  And when she saw those aged eyes brimming full of tears, and marked the quivering lips, she threw her arms round the faithful mother’s neck, and wept there, as she had done in many a childish sorrow, but with a deeper, a more wretched grief.

Her mother hushed her on her breast; and lulled her as if she were a baby; and she grew still and quiet.

They sat thus for a long, long time.  At last, Susan Palmer came up with some tea and bread and butter for Mrs. Leigh.  She watched the mother feed her sick, unwilling child, with every fond inducement to eat which she could devise; they neither of them took notice of Susan’s presence.  That night they lay in each other’s arms; but Susan slept on the ground beside them.

They took the little corpse (the little unconscious sacrifice, whose early calling-home had reclaimed her poor wandering mother) to the hills, which in her lifetime she had never seen.  They dared not lay her by the stern grandfather in Milne Row churchyard, but they bore her to a lone moorland graveyard, where, long ago, the Quakers used to bury their dead.  They laid her there on the sunny slope, where the earliest spring flowers blow.

Will and Susan live at the Upclose Farm.  Mrs. Leigh and Lizzie dwell in a cottage so secluded that, until you drop into the very hollow where it is placed, you do not see it.  Tom is a schoolmaster in Rochdale, and he and Will help to support their mother.  I only know that, if the cottage be hidden in a green hollow of the hills, every sound of sorrow in the whole upland is heard there—­every call of suffering or of sickness for help is listened to by a sad, gentle-looking woman, who rarely smiles (and when she does her smile is more sad than other people’s tears), but who comes out of her seclusion whenever there is a shadow in any household.  Many hearts bless Lizzie Leigh, but she—­she prays always and ever for forgiveness—­such forgiveness as may enable her to see her child once more.  Mrs. Leigh is quiet and happy.  Lizzie is, to her eyes, something precious—­as the lost piece of silver—­found once more.  Susan is the bright one who brings sunshine to all.  Children grow around her and call her blessed.  One is called Nanny; her Lizzie often takes to the sunny graveyard in the uplands, and while the little creature gathers the daisies, and makes chains, Lizzie sits by a little grave and weeps bitterly.

***End of the project gutenberg EBOOK Lizzie Leigh***