Hester told Mrs. Baldwin to lead the way, and followed her up the stairs.

The top rooms were two poor enough garret ones. In the largest, the ceiling sloped to the floor till there was only height enough for the small chest of drawers of painted pine to stand against the wall. A similar washstand and a low bed completed the furniture. The bed was immediately behind the door, and there lay the woman, with a bolster heightened by a thin petticoat and threadbare cloak under her head. Hester saw a pale, patient, worn face, with large eyes, thoughtful and troubled.

“Here’s a kind lady come to see you,” said her landlady.

It annoyed Hester to be called kind, but she spoke perhaps the more kindly to the poor woman because of Mrs. Baldwin’s words.

“It must be dreary for you to lie here all alone,” she said, taking the thin hand into hers. “May I sit a few minutes beside you? I was once in bed for a whole month and found it very wearisome. I was at school then. I don’t mind being ill when I have my mother nearby.”

The woman gazed up at her with eyes that looked like the dry wells of tears.

“It’s very good of you, miss,” she said. “It’s a long stair to climb up.”

She lay and gazed and said nothing more. Her child lay asleep on her arm, a poor little washed-out rag of humanity, but dear to the woman from the way she now and then tried to look at it, which was not easy for her.

Hester sat down and tried to talk, but found it hard to get on. After a few moments a dead silence came.

“What can be the good of a common creature like me going to visit people?” she said to herself. “I have nothing to say. I would help them if I could, but what can I do?”

For a few moments she sat silently, growing more and more uncomfortable, and thinking how to begin. The baby woke and began to whimper. The mother, who rarely let him off her arm, because then she was not able to get him till help came, drew him up to her, and began to nurse him. Suddenly the heart of the young, strong woman was pierced to the quick at the sight of how ill-fitted was the mother for what she had to do. “If only I could help her!”

She had yet to learn that the love of God is so deep he can be satisfied with nothing less than getting as near as it is possible for the Father to draw nigh to his children—and that is into absolute contact of heart with heart, love with love, being with being. And as that must be wrought out from the deepest inside, divine law working itself up through our nature into our consciousness and will, and claiming us as divine, who can tell by what slow certainties of approach God is drawing nigh to the most suffering of his creatures? Only, if we so comfort ourselves with such thoughts as to do nothing, we, when God and they meet, shall find ourselves out in the cold—a cold infinitely worse than any trouble this world has to show.