choose to see him, so I only heard what he cared to tell me--and I didn't believe the half of that.

"One night I went to a masked ball with Mrs. Sutton--she was a larky one, she was, and led her husband a pretty dance. It was latish when I came back; I hadn't enjoyed myself one bit, and left in a temper and came off home by myself I let myself in at the front door, and when I came into this room, on the table just here"--she pointed with her finger--"there was a pillow, and on the pillow was the baby, and he was kneeling on the floor in front, his elbows on the table, and his face on his hands, and the tears streaming down his cheeks as if they'd never stop. I'd been to the ball as a ballet girl--though he hadn't known it, and I hadn't meant that he should, but the sight took me so aback that, without thinking, I dropped my cloak and stood before him just as I was. 'What's the matter now?' I cried; 'what's the child down here at this time of the night for?' I expected that he'd let fly at me, and perhaps send me packing out of the house right there and then. But, instead, he just glanced my way as if he hardly saw me, or wanted to, and said, 'Baby's dying.' When he said that, it was as if he had run something right into my heart. 'Dying,' I cried, 'stuff!' I ran to the table and bent over the pillow. I had never seen anybody dying before, and knew nothing at all about it, but directly I looked at it, I seemed to know that what he said was true, and that the child was dying. My heart stopped beating--I couldn't breathe, I couldn't speak, I couldn't move, I could only stare like a creature who had lost her wits--it was as if a hand had been stretched right out of Heaven to strike me a blow. There he was on one side of the table--and there was me leaning right over the other, both of us motionless, neither of us speaking a word; and there was the baby lying on the pillow between us, stiller than we were. How long we stopped like that I don't know; it seemed to me as if it was hours--but I daresay it was only a few minutes. All at once the baby--my baby--gave a little movement with its little arms--a sort of trembling. He moved his arm, and put one of his fingers into its tiny hand; the baby seemed to fasten on to it. 'Give it one of your fingers,' he said, sobbing as if his heart would break. 'It'll like to feel your finger as it goes!' Hardly knowing what I was doing, I stretched out one of my fingers; it was the first finger of my right hand--this one." She held up the finger in question in its ragged casing. "And I put it in the mite's wee hand. It took it--yes, it took it. It closed its fingers right round it, and gave it quite a squeeze--yes, quite a squeeze. Then it loosened its hold. It was 

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