"Mamma! mamma!" screamed the frightened little one, as Rushmere tried to lift her from her hiding place, under the tattered cloak of a young woman, whose slight emaciated form lay shrouded in the wet heather.
The farmer slightly stirred the prostrate sleeper with his foot.
"Woman—Thou beest a sound sleeper—Wake up, and see to thy bairn, and I will gie thee both a good breakfast."
The figure remained motionless. There was no answering voice or sound.
The farmer stooped down, and raised the shabby bonnet from the face of the woman to examine her more carefully.
He stepped hastily back, his cheeks, before so fresh and ruddy, were now blanched with a deadly pallor.
The poor marble statue at his feet can no longer respond to the cries of her famishing child. She is cold, is dead.
A forlorn victim of want—perhaps, of vice, overtaken by night and storm, rendered feeble by disease and famine, unable to battle with the hostile elements, has died unknown and unheeded in that lonely spot. No human ear heard her cries for help, no pitying voice soothed her last agonies. No friendly eye marked the despairing love which clutched to her chilling bosom the tender form of her sleeping child, when during the bitter conflict with death, she implored the Heavenly Father to take them both.
She was still very young, not over twenty years of age; and, though squalid and dirty, and clothed with the filthy rags that vice bestows upon her degraded victims, her shrunken features retained even in death some semblance of former beauty. Her hands were small and white, and delicately formed; and seemed to have been little accustomed to hard work or out-door drudgery.
A plain gold ring encircled the third finger of the left hand. There was no money in her pockets, nothing that could give the least clue to who, or what she had been. It was painfully evident to the most casual observer, that she had died of absolute starvation.