"Do you feel easier, dear?" asked Eugénie, gently bending over the bed.
"Yes," replied Kitty in a slow, tired voice. "Better now; it will soon be over. You--you will look after my child?"
"I promise you, I will," said Eugénie fervently. "Would you like to see a minister?"
Kitty smiled with a touch of her old cynicism, and then her eyes filled with tears.
"A minister, yes," she said in a faltering voice. "God help me! and I was a minister's daughter. Look at me now, fallen and degraded, dying, with my life before me, and glad--yes, glad to die."
In obedience to a sign from Eugénie, Keith had slipped out of the room in order to bring the clergyman, and Kitty lay quiet, with the clear light of the evening shining on her pale face.
"Give me my child," she said at length, and then, as she took Meg to her breast and kissed her, she wept bitterly.
"God bless you, my darling," she sobbed; "think of me with pity. Eugénie, never--never let her know what I was. Let her believe me to have been a good woman. If I have sinned, see how I was tempted--see how I have suffered--let my child think her mother was a good woman."
Eugénie, crying bitterly, promised this, and then tried to take Meg away.
"Mumsey," said Meg, clinging to her mother, "why do you cry? Where are you going?"