been in the habit of supplying her daughter with money, he kept such a check upon the purse of Mrs. Verner as precluded her from any important repetition of her generosity.

Meanwhile, Harman Hiltz appeared in his true character to Alice, his wife; coming home to their wretched lodgings at all hours of the night, and often in a brawling state of intoxication.

Three months had not elapsed before he upbraided her for being penniless, and in less than six months he deserted her, saying he was going to travel on the Continent. There were gambling houses in Germany, he told her, where a fellow might either replenish his purse or ruin himself quite. If he made his fortune he would return; if he lost the few pounds he had, he should come back no more, and she might go home to her beast of a father.

Wifely, womanly appeals had no effect upon Harman Hiltz, though Alice grew quite eloquent in her distress, offering to go with him to beg, slave, starve, so that she might be by his side.

"You should have obeyed your father," said Hiltz; "why the devil didn't you, eh? You knew his beastly temper; you knew he would never relent; you knew he would never shell out one stiver, demmie stars! and you hang yourself on to me like a whelk. Why the deuce can't you go home and honour your father and mother, and all that sort of thing? I'm off, so the's an end to it, demmie stars! It's one thing or the other with me: a prison in London or freedom in Germany. Go home to your father, and fall in love with some other fellow as soon as you like."

And Harman Hiltz disappeared from London, without even communicating to his friend Mr. Quelks, who was undergoing the process of whitewashing in Basinghall Street.

This was in the autumn, when short days and cold nights pinch the hungry, and give terrible warning of the winter that is to come.

To dwell at length upon Alice's fortunes at this period is simply to paint a harrowing scene of misery, which the reader can fully understand for himself when he contrasts the luxuries of Victoria House with the wretchedness of a garret in Drury Lane. Moving from one lodging to another, from bad to worse, Mrs. Verner found it impossible to maintain a constant correspondence with her daughter, without a regular intimation of these changes from Alice. Weighed down with her woes, alarmed at the violence of her father towards Mrs. Verner, as described by a trusty messenger prior to her removal into this last wretched lodging, Alice had determined to try and maintain herself without further aid from home.

CHAPTER III.

DESERTED.

As the winter came on, Mrs. Harman Hiltz found it impossible to exist on the miserable pittance she could earn by her needle. The sale of her last trifles of jewelry had only brought sufficient to buy clothing for the infant that was born at the latter end of a dreary November day.

It was a terrible trial. The wonder is that so fragile a creature, accustomed for years to every luxury, had not sunk under it. She refused to give any clue to her name or address at the lodgings. The doctor was as kind to her as he would have been to any other unfortunate woman in her condition. The landlady shook her head at the wedding-ring; the doctor said it was "a pity—so young and evidently so well brought up." And so Mrs. Hiltz found herself a mother, in debt to the landlady, penniless, and half clad, when the first snow of winter fell, making the gloomy garret darker and colder, and sharpening the keen edge of her adversity until she had nearly died of apprehension for her baby, which was the only thing now worth living for.

More than once she had resolved within herself to go to her father's house, fling herself at his feet, and seek compassion for her child. It was not for herself that she would plead, but for this poor innocent creature, that must die with its mother of sheer starvation unless forgiveness were obtained. At length came Christmas Eve, with its tender, Christian memorials. The bells of an adjacent church were ringing pleasantly, and their music seemed to part the crisp, frosty air, and break in sweet hopeful tones against the panes of the little window in Drury Lane.

"I will go! I will go!" said the poor, pale, hungry woman, clutching her child closely to her bosom, and looking out into the darkness.

Then she laid the little one gently down, lighted the remains of a rushlight, and dressed the child with the care and fondness of a mother who hoped that its bright, round, cheerful face would exercise a favourable impression whither it was going.

"There, there, my pretty!" she said, as the baby whimpered at the extra tying and fastening and folding to which it was being subjected. "There, there; it shall see its grandpa, and soften his heart, and go home to a warm fire ;" and her own dull eyes lighted up with a strong but transient hope.

The snow fell pitilessly as the woman hurried along the Strand with her burthen. The lights in the shop windows flung illuminated protests out into the streets against the great flakes of snow that darkened the windows. There was no sound of wheels; but the busy hum of many voices seemed to hurry Alice on to her destination, and the sound of bells now and then fell upon her ear, and nestled in her beating heart. A weary, weary way it was by Westminster, on past the Houses of Parliament, over the bridge beyond, and by that dull, fierce river; but at last she stood at her father's door. She did not notice that all the blinds were down. She was desperate, for the love of her child, desperate in behalf of that sleeping infant, which would presently cry of cold and hunger.

By-and-by the door was opened by a strange servant who knew her not, and would have forced her back into the street. "This ain't a time for beggars," he said.

"Where is Mrs. Marthers, the housekeeper ?" said the woman. "Upstairs along of the dead," said the flunkey, with solemn grandeur.

"Who's dead? Who's dead?" asked Mrs. Hiltz.

"Oh, come, none of that, you know," said the man, taking her by the arm. "I wouldn't ha' let you in if I thought you'd a been up to that game."

Oh, mercy! mercy!" exclaimed the woman, rushing past him and dashing into the dining-room at the extreme end of the hall.

"What's this? what's this?" exclaimed Mr. Verner, who had been sitting over his port, and thinking how happy Victoria House was last Christmas, and what a desolation it was now.

"It's your daughter and her child!" said the wretched woman, falling at his feet. "Oh, have mercy! have mercy!"

"Mercy!" said Mr. Verner, knitting his brows, and standing aghast at the wretched woman before him, whom he had hardly known but for her voice and that shower of dark-brown hair which had escaped from her bonnet. "Mercy, indeed! Had you any mercy on me? on her who lies dead-on your mother?"

"Oh, no, no, no! don't say dead, don't say dead!" exclaimed the woman in an agony of grief.

"Dead! I say dead !" exclaimed the father, feeling to the full the desolation of his house; "killed by you-by you. Away with you! -begone, ungrateful, wretched matricide. A curse upon you! Go -go-go!" He thrust her out into the hall, and that gorgeous flunkey speedily banged the door upon her.

It was only the crying of her child that kept the unhappy woman

from losing her reason. With a dull, heavy sense of what had befallen her, she staggered out into the open air. The snow fell upon her, but she heeded it not; it fell in dull heavy flakes, shutting out the gas-lights with a soft fluffy curtain, and muffling the foot-falls of passengers on their way to friendly firesides. That poor woman, with the child in her arms, hurried on like the rest, but to no friendly shelter she hurried on through the snow with a breaking heart. They knew it not, those people who passed her, or, the world is not so hard but that she would have had offers of pecuniary relief. Sorrow and affliction take possession of the human heart as softly and as surely as the snow takes possession of the earth, on winter nights like this hard one in the history of the Verner household.

Ten minutes after her departure, Mr. Verner called the man who had let the beggar woman in, gave him twenty sovereigns, and bade him hurry after that woman with this money.

"And get her address," he said, as the servant left the room; but the poor woman had scrambled into a 'bus near the Park, more for the purpose of sheltering her child than for hastening her journey towards Drury Lane. So the man returned to Victoria House with the money, stopping for a moment by the way to see carriages setting down a host of happy children who were going to a splendid Christmas party at Lord Wellden's on the other side of the way. The merry chatter and laughter of the little ones, in their operacloaks and satin shoes, protected from the snow by an ample awning— what a contrast to that other scene which had just been enacted close by!

What may not love, and pride, and selfishness do amongst those hearts that throb so healthily now! Happy childhood, that hath no knowledge of the future that is in store for it! May heaven spare us and our little ones, all such miseries as those which befel the daughter of that rich, proud father, who is struggling with contending passions in the house where Death is holding solemn court amidst the festive sports of Christmas-tide!

CHAPTER IV.

DEAD.

ON any other morning the piazzas in Covent Garden would hardly have concealed what a policeman found huddled up in a corner there. But Christmas Eve coming on Saturday, there was all that strange, solemn repose in Covent Garden on the next morning, which

contrasts so remarkably with the customary noise, and bustle, and excitement, its normal condition on every day in the week, Sunday excepted, from the earliest hours after midnight. Sauntering along, glad of being under cover for a time, a policeman suddenly found his foot in contact with a heavy bundle under the piazzas leading to Bow Street. Turning on the light of his bull's eye, he saw a woman lying dead upon the pavement. Closely folded in her arms was an infant, whose little eyes blinked in the glow of the constable's lantern.

Obtaining assistance, the officer took the woman to the deadhouse, and the baby to the workhouse. Some people would sooner be taken to the former than to the latter; but the infant of Mrs. Hiltz had nothing to say on the subject except "coo-coo-coo," a remark which fell from its chubby lips every now and then, whilst its voracious appetite was being satisfied. And in a short time it lay peacefully in a pauper bed, and looked as happy and comfortable as a princess might have looked under a splendid coverlid of lace and satin. In due course an inquest was held upon the mother; a verdict of found dead was returned, and the body buried,—Mr. Jonathan Verner being too much engrossed with the gorgeous ceremony of his wife's interment, even to notice the brief paragraph in the papers which chronicled the "Social Tragedy on Christmas Eve."

The infant thrived amain under the dominion of the Poor Law Guardians, and grew to be a bright, quick, intelligent child. The matron fancying she discovered a likeness in the foundling to an infant she had lost, paid some extra attention to the little one, and nearly lost her place through the complaint of a fierce economist on the board, who insisted that favouritism was contrary to the law, and that the guardians did not want in a matron, a soft-hearted, silly woman; but one who would consider the burthens of the rate-payers, and the duty she owed to them and to her country in general. The master of the workhouse had to speak up for his wife, and appeal to statistics to appease the ill-feeling which the economist had excited. Happily for the foundling, the chairman of the board was a kindlydisposed, humane man; and he sought out little Bessie (for she was christened after the matron's child), and agreed with Mistress Matron that the infant was no ordinary child, but the offspring of parents in a far higher position than they were accustomed to encounter at the Union.

As years sped on Bessie began to think seriously of her position, and to take a deep interest in that long past incident of Covent