“Poor Tom, poor Tom!” sighed Elizabeth, “my own poor Tom!”

She forgot Esther; either from Tom’s not mentioning her, or in the strong return to old times which his letter produced; forgot her for the time being as completely as if she had never existed.  Even when the recollection came it made little difference.  The sharp jealousy, the dislike and contempt had all calmed down:  she thought she could now see Tom’s wife as any other woman.  Especially if, as the letter indicated, they were so very poor and miserable.

Possibly Esther had suggested writing it?  Perhaps, though Tom did not, Esther did “want to get something out of her”—­Elizabeth Hand, who was known to have large wages, and to be altogether a thriving person?  Well, it mattered little.  The one fact remained:  Tom was in distress; Tom needed her; she must go.

Her only leisure time was of an evening, after Henry was in bed.  The intervening hours, especially the last one, when the child was down stairs with his father, calmed her; subdued the tumult of old remembrances that came surging up and beating at the long shut door of her heart.  When her boy returned, leaping and laughing, and playing all sorts of tricks as she put him to bed, she could smile too.  And when kneeling beside her in his pretty white night gown, he stammered through the prayer she had thought it right to begin to teach him, though of course he was too young to understand it—­the words “Thy will be done;” “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us;” and lastly, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” struck home to his nurse’s in most soul.

“Mammy, mammy Lizzie’s ’tying.”

Yes, she was crying, but it did her good.  She was able to kiss her little boy, who slept like a top in five minutes:  then she took off her good silk gown, and dressed herself; soberly and decently, but so that people should not suspect, in that low and dangerous neighborhood, the sovereigns that she carried in an under pocket, ready to use as occasion required.  Thus equipped, without a minute’s delay, she started for Tom’s lodging.

It was poorer than even she expected.  One attic room, bate almost as when it was built.  No chimney or grate, no furniture except a box which served as both table and chair; and a heap of straw, with a blanket thrown over it.  The only comfort about it was that it was clean; Tom’s innate sense of refinement had abided with him to the last.

Elizabeth had time to make all these observations, for Tom was out—­gone, the landlady said, to the druggist’s shop, round the corner.

“He’s very bad, ma’am,” added the woman, civilly, probably led thereto by Elizabeth’s respectable appearance, and the cab in which she had come—­lest she should lose a minute’s time.  “Can’t last long, and Lord knows who’s to bury him.”

With that sentence knelling in her ears, Elizabeth waited till she heard the short cough and the hard breathing of some one toiling heavily up the stair.  Tom, Tom himself.  But oh, so altered! with every bit of youth gone out of him; with death written on every line of his haggard face, the death he had once prognosticated with a sentimental pleasure, but which now had come upon him in all its ghastly reality.