Fortunately, Mr. Jocelyn was not at home when they returned, and they had a chance to take a quiet breath after their strong excitement.  Mrs. Wheaton, with many hearty congratulations and words of cheer, took her departure.  Mrs. Jocelyn was justly solicitous about Mildred, fearing that the reaction from an ordeal that would tax the strongest might bring utter prostration to her delicate and sensitive organism.  Mildred’s manner soon threatened to realize her worst fears.  She had passed a sleepless night, and was faint from fatigue, and yet, as the hours lapsed, she grew more nervously restless.  Her eyes were hot and dry, sometimes so full of resolution that they were stern in their steadfastness, and again her face expressed a pathetic irresoluteness and sadness that made the mother’s heart ache.

“Millie,” she whispered, as she came to the bed on which the girl was tossing restlessly, “there’s something on your mind.  Mother’s eyes are quick in reading the face of her child.  You are thinking—­you are debating something that won’t let you rest, when you need rest so much.  Oh, Millie darling, my heart was growing apathetic—­it seemed almost dead in my breast.  I’ve suffered on account of your father, till it seemed as if I couldn’t suffer any more; but your peril and your troubled face teach me that it is not dead, and that my best solace now is devotion to my children.  What is it, Millie, that you are turning over in your mind, which makes you look so desperately sad and fearful, and again—­and then your expression frightens me—­so determined as if you were meditating some step, which, I fear, you ought not to take?  Oh, Millie, my child, the worst that I know about is bad enough, God knows, but your face makes me dread that you may be led by your troubles to do something which you would not think of were you less morbid and overwrought.  I may have seemed to you a poor, weak woman in all of our troubles, but mother’s love is strong, if her mind and body are not.”

“Mamma, mamma, do not judge me or yourself so harshly.  You have always been my ideal, mamma, and I was thinking of nothing worse than how to rescue you and the others from your desperate straits.  How can we go on living in this way, your heart breaking, your poor, frail body overtaxed with coarse labor, and Belle, Minnie, and Fred becoming contaminated by our dreadful surroundings.  The shock I’ve received has awakened me from my old apathy.  I see that while I just toiled for daily bread, and a little of it too, we were drifting down, down.  Papa grows worse and worse.  Belle is in danger; and what will become of Fred and Minnie if they remain long amid such scenes?  Only yesterday morning I heard Fred quarrelling with another little boy on the landing, and lisping out oaths in his anger.  Oh, mamma, we must be able to look forward to some escape from all this, or else you will soon give way to despair, and the worst will come.  Oh that I were a man!  Oh that I knew how to do something,