"Baby's here, and you, and Joan," moaned the faint voice again, "and there's nowhere else in all the world for me."
"Is there anything I can do to give you rest?" asked Aunt Priscilla, shivering.
"If you'd only forgive me before I die!" answered Rhoda, lifting up a white, thin face, which could be seen dimly in the gloom.
Aunt Priscilla sunk down on her knees before the open window. Rhoda was not dead, then! It was she herself, not her ghost, that was wandering about the old places, and haunting the home that had once been hers, and which now sheltered her baby. Where she had been all the week Aunt Priscilla did not know. But what was she to do with her now? Must she let her die outside her door on this winter's night?
As she knelt there in silence she heard the clock strike twelve, and the bells from the little grey belfry of the church on the shore ring cheerily out into the night. Two years ago she and her neighbours had watched the Old Year out in the kitchen below; and she could see, as it were, Rhoda's pretty face again, and Joan's sleepy eyes, as they stood beside her singing the New Year hymn, as soon as the clock had finished striking. The familiar verses of the hymn ran through her mind till she came to the last but one—
Oh! that each in the day of His coming may say,
"I have fought my way through,
I have finished the work Thou didst give me to do."
But Aunt Priscilla felt that she had not finished the work the Lord had given her to do for Rhoda; she had not even begun what He had given her to do for little Joan. If Rhoda had sinned against her, surely she had sinned against Christ.
With a heavy sob she rose from her knees and went downstairs. The house was empty, except that Joan and the baby were sleeping in Rhoda's old bedroom; for all the rest had gone to keep the watch-night in a chapel two miles or more away. The house-door was not fastened, and she had only to lift the latch in order to open it. There was not the slightest sound from the threshold outside where Rhoda was crouching; no moaning or sobbing, no movement of any kind. Aunt Priscilla opened the door very gently and noiselessly.
"Rhoda!" she said, very pitifully.
But the girl did not answer her. She stooped down and raised her up against her shoulder. Oh! what a small, light burden she seemed, no heavier than when she was a young child like Joan. Aunt Priscilla lifted her quite easily in her arms, and carried her upstairs and laid her on the bed. Then she struck a light, and, shading it with her hand, looked down on Rhoda's face, as she had done many a time when she had been a sleeping child. The face was sharp and thin and death-like; she looked like one who had perished from hunger and want. Was she really dead?