An alms! But on second thoughts he said: "Well, I have offered him a fortune, and he gives me ten shillings.

One good turn deserves another." So he pocketed the half-sovereign, and bought his little Grace a neck-handkerchief, blue with white spots; and so this unlucky man and his child fought their way from west to east, till they reached that place where we introduced them to the reader.
That was an era in their painful journey, because until then Hope's only anxiety was to find food and some little comfort for his child.

But this morning little Grace had begun to cough, a little dry cough that struck on the father's heart like a knell.

Her mother had died of consumption: were the seeds of that fatal malady in her child?
If so, hardship, fatigue, cold, and privation would develop them rapidly, and she would wither away into the grave before his eyes.

So he looked down on her in an agony of foreboding, and shivered in his shirt sleeves, not at the cold, but at the future.