Of course she would. Many are interested by seeing their friends
under the new aspect of illness; and among the poor there is no
wholesome fear of injury or excitement to restrain this wish.

So Mary went upstairs, accompanied by Mrs. Davenport, wringing the
suds off her hands, and speaking in a loud whisper far more audible
than her usual voice.

"I mun be hastening home, but I'll come again to-night, time enough
to iron her cap; 'twould be a sin and a shame if we let her go dirty
now she's ill, when she's been so rare and clean all her life long.
But she's sadly forsaken, poor thing! She'll not know you, Mary;
she knows none of us."

The room upstairs held two beds, one superior in the grandeur of
four posts and checked curtains to the other, which had been
occupied by the twins in their brief lifetime. The smaller had been
Alice's bed since she had lived there; but with the natural
reverence to one "stricken of God and afflicted," she had been
installed, since her paralytic stroke the evening before, in the
larger and grander bed; while Jane Wilson had taken her short broken
rest on the little pallet.

Margaret came forwards to meet her friend, whom she half expected,
and whose step she knew. Mrs. Davenport returned to her washing.

The two girls did not speak; the presence of Alice awed them into
silence. There she lay with the rosy colour, absent from her face
since the days of childhood, flushed once more into it by her