When the sleigh stopped, and the merry jingle of the horses’ bells ceased, a curtain was pulled aside from a window of number forty-five, then the door flew open, and a thin slip of a woman in a cotton dress ran out to meet them.
“O, the child! the child!—don’t say death to me!”
“Motherly anxiety,” commented the Judge to himself, and strange to say his heart sank. If the boy had a mother he would never get him.
He stared at the excited wisp of a woman who was dragging the child from the fur robes, and was violently hugging him. “O, Bethany! Bethany! you aint dead.”
“Dead, no,” said the Judge, “he is only asleep,” and he proceeded to tell the woman the story of their finding the child.
She listened to him, holding her head up, and with a strained expression on her thin face, and after a time the Judge stopped talking, for he discovered that she had not heard a word of what he was saying.
“I’m deef!” she exclaimed, “deefer than that iron post. Come in, come in,” and clutching the little boy firmly by the hand she backed into a tiny hall, and threw open the door of a small front room where a table was set as if for a meal.
“Wait for us,” said the Judge to the cabman, then he followed her.
The cloth on the table was white but threadbare, and the appointments were all so meager that the Judge averted his head. He had a tender heart, and now that he was getting toward old age the awful inequality between the lot of the rich and the poor struck a painful sympathy to his heart.
“What makes this boy so sleepy?” he asked, pointing to the little child.