"An' how ye could go and tell her all of a sudden!" said Esther, reproachfully.
"I didn't think when I spoke, and it did good too, for they'd ha' given her longer imprisonment but for that. 'Twas her being caught, ye see, with the loaf in one hand, an' the purse in the other, which made so much o' the matter, an' she wouldn't plead guilty to the purse—she didn't scarce know she had touched it, she said, an' others declared she was a-carryin' it off. An' what do they know of the home and the misery as drove her to it?" said John bitterly. "I've felt nigh bein' driv to something desperate myself, before now of late. Anyway she's caged up now for two months, till fourth o' November. That child ain't going to stay here, Esther."
"Where be she to go?" asked Esther in a compassionate tone.
"She ain't a-going to stay here," repeated John, doggedly. "I've give way once, as ye know, to takin' in other folks' children—no need to go into that now. I never grumbles at what's done, and I loves her now like to my own; but I ain't a-going to do it a second time. We've enough an' to spare of our own."
"What'll we do with her?" asked Esther.
"There's the work'us," said John. "I'll take her there myself to-morrow. Ye needn't say a word against it."
"And her poor mother, as prided herself on never takin' a grain of help from the parish," said Esther.
"She must take the consequence o' her own deed," said John, somewhat less indulgent towards her himself, than he had perhaps expected the magistrates to be. "Starvin' or no starvin', 'twas stealin', and she must put up with the consequence. There's no one left as belongs to the child, an' to the work'us she'll go."
Ailie never moved or spoke, but she was not asleep. Every word had fallen on her ears like a blow. Mother in prison for two months—two whole months. O what a long time it seemed to poor little Ailie! She could scarcely have felt more hopeless at the prospect of two years' separation. And then to be sent away herself—away to the workhouse—away, all alone; among utter strangers. She had been brought up with such a horror of the workhouse; prison itself sounded hardly worse to her. Not that she knew anything about what kind of a place it was, except that her mother's one great dread for months past, and her father's too, had been that of "coming to the workhouse." What would mother think of her being there? Poor Ailie forgot or did not understand that the lesser disgrace of dependence on the parish would be swallowed up in the far deeper disgrace of trial and imprisonment for theft.
Worst of all to Ailie was the thought of her mother coming home at the far-off end of those two months, and finding her child gone. What if she didn't know where to go, and never found Ailie, and Ailie never saw her again! Ailie cried silently at the thought. She could not, could not go. She must wait here for mother; she would be a trouble to no one, and eat so little, and sleep anywhere, and creep into corners—only she couldn't go away.