“‘It’s a good hundred a year out of our pocket,’ said she.  ’If he had only lived to get on board, we need never have told Cross Hall about his dying afterwards—­and he looked the picture of health only yesterday.  I wish some one would lend us a child!  Maybe the woman in the next room will.  He never saw it, and he’d not know the difference between one child and another.’

“So mother went into the next room.  It was let to a woman with one child, and she was to sail for America the next day to join her husband, who had written for her.  She seemed to be poor, and mother had no doubt that for a pound or so she would lend us the child; but when she went into the room the mother was out, and the child was lying on the bed asleep.  Mother was very quick and clever.  Our boy was so changed with the convulsions that I would never have known him again; and this boy was much the same size and age, and not very unlike him, so she slipped off the child’s nightgown and put poor Frank’s clothes on it, and dressed my dead child in the nightgown she took off, and put it in the bed.  She would not give me time to cry, but got into a hackney coach and rode off to where we were to meet Harry.  She told me afterwards that she meant to take back the woman her child, if possible; but, in case of not being able to do it, she got all our luggage which was ready packed, into the hackney coach, and paid the woman of the house all we owed her.

“When I saw Harry again he looked changed—­far graver and duller.  I was full of sorrow about Frank; and I cried sore when I saw his father.  But then he thought I only cried, out of cunning, to get something more out of him.  Harry took the child in his arms and looked at it all over.  ‘Poor thing,’ says he—­’poor thing!’ and I saw a tear drop on that stranger’s face.  My own boy—­his own boy—­he had never touched, and never looked at.  I was jealous and fierce at both of them, in my grief and my rage; but mother was pleased to see him so taken up with the child, for she thought it would be all the better for us.

“‘Well,’ says he, ’are you ready to go on board this afternoon? for the ship will get off to night with the tide, and I will see you all right.’

“‘Yes,’ says mother, ’we are all ready; but we want to know what allowance you are willing to make.  You must take into consideration that we are banished, and have to leave everybody we know.  What will you allow for Elizabeth, and what for little Frank?’

“‘I think,’ said Harry, speaking slow, ’that I will arrange differently about the child.  As he is my son, I think he would be better in other hands than yours.  Will you leave the boy with me?’

“I was just on the point of saying it was none of mine, nor of his neither; but mother saw her own interest in this, as she did in most things, and so says she——­

“’It’s cruel to part Elizabeth from her child, very cruel.  Will you, that has treated her so bad, be good to the boy?  Do you mean to acknowledge him?’