She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees.

The mother, always anaemic and consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony, peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and body.

Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to this pass had been infinitely maternal.

There had been a boundless pity in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and gloried accordingly.

To be cut off now from all ministration, all comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken his neck--and buried him"-- it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed.