And he could not breathe a word of it to his wife.  Oh that better curse of poverty, which puts corrupting poison into the wounds inflicted by nature, which outrages the spirit’s tenderness, which profanes with unutterable defilement the secret places of the mourning heart!  He could not, durst not, speak a word of this misery to her whose gratitude and love had resisted every trial, who had shared uncomplainingly all the evil of his lot, and had borne with supreme patience those added sufferings of which he had no conception.  For she lay on her deathbed.  The doctor told him so on the very day when he learnt that it would be out of his power to discharge the fitting pieties at her grave.  So far from looking to her for sympathy, it behoved him to keep from her as much as a suspicion of what had happened.

Their home at this time was a kitchen in King’s Cross Road.  The eldest child, Amy, was now between ten and eleven; Annie was nine; Tom seven.  These, of course, went to school every day, and were being taught to appreciate the woefulness of their inheritance.  Amy was, on the whole, a good girl; she could make purchases as well as her mother, and when in the mood, look carefully after her little brother and sister; but already she had begun to display restiveness under the hard discipline to which the domestic poverty subjected her.  Once she had played truant from school, and told falsehoods to the teachers to explain her absence.  It was discovered that she had been tempted by other girls to go and see the Lord Mayor’s show.  Annie and Tom threatened to be troublesome when they got a little older; the boy could not be taught to speak the truth, and his sister was constantly committing petty thefts of jam, sugar, even coppers; and during the past year their mother was seldom able to exert herself in correcting these faults.  Only by dint of struggle which cost her agonies could she discharge the simplest duties of home.  She made a brave fight against disease and penury and incessant dread of the coming day, but month after month her strength failed.  Now at length she tried vainly to leave her bed.  The last reserve of energy was exhausted, and the end near.

After her death, what then?  Through the nights of this week after her doom had been spoken she lay questioning the future.  She knew that but for her unremitting efforts Hewett would have yielded to the despair of a drunkard; the crucial moment was when he found himself forsaken by his daughter, and no one but this poor woman could know what force of loving will, what entreaties, what tears, had drawn him back a little way from the edge of the gulf.  Throughout his life until that day of Clara’s disappearance he had seemed in no danger from the deadliest enemy of the poor; one taste of the oblivion that could be bought at any street-corner, and it was as though drinking had been a recognised habit with him.  A year, two years, and he still drank himself into forgetfulness as often as his mental suffering waxed