"Oh, the Mitchell lot has gone into the front room, if you please. Going up again in the world, I can tell you."
Juliet turned and dashed into the front room. There she found another surprise.
Her father lay sleeping; her mother was sewing at some black hats and bits of crape. The other children, all but Albert, stood round about the room; some crying silently, some watching their mother, who paused every now and then in her work to wipe away tears which quickly returned.
But there was one whom Juliet missed.
"Mother," she said, as Mrs. Mitchell's arms clasped closely round her, "where is baby?"
Tears poured down from the mother's eyes. "Oh, baby, baby, our darling baby is gone! He was took with the croup yesterday morning, and he just went off in the evening. There was too many of you, and now he's gone!"
A sad silence fell upon the room. Thomas Mitchell moaned in his sleep, as if his dreams were painful. Outside in the street there was a sound of angry voices—two women quarrelling. Mrs. Webster had once had a baby of her own; it had died. She felt, she knew, all that Mrs. Mitchell was feeling now.
The bits of black on which the mother was at work were poor and skimpy, but they betokened a real sorrow. And though Mrs. Mitchell knew that the "home for little children" was far, far better for them than the busy, hard world, yet she could not bring her heart to be thankful that baby was taken; all that she could say was, "Thy will be done!"
In the mortuary belonging to the church lay the little, thin, pale body of baby Thomas Mitchell. Life, though short, had been very hard for him, and he had gone out of it at the first call from his Father in heaven—at the first sound of that voice which is sweeter and more drawing than the voice of a mother.
Other children had gone before him; but because he was the baby his loss was more acutely felt than that of the others had been. Juliet sat and thought of the many times she had bumped his tender head against the wall, and how often she had let him slip off her lap, or left him lying in the rain or in the fierce sunshine. And now the darling baby had died, and she away from home! She had not watched his last sigh, she had not given him one farewell kiss! Already he was in his tiny coffin, and she would never in this life see him again, save in those blessed dreams which now and then restore to us for a time our loved and lost ones.