The remaining child was an infant, born but a fortnight ago,
lying at its mother's breast. Mrs. Hewett sat on the bed, and bent
forward in an attitude of physical weakness. Her age was
twenty-seven, but she looked several years older. At nineteen she
had married; her husband, John Hewett, having two children by a
previous union. Her face could never have been very attractive, but
it was good-natured, and wore its pleasantest aspect as she smiled
on Sidney's entrance. You would have classed her at once with those
feeble-willed, weak-minded, yet kindly-disposed women, who are only
too ready to meet affliction half-way, and who, if circumstances be
calamitous, are more harmful than an enemy to those they hold dear.
She was rather wrapped up than dressed, and her hair, thin and
pale-coloured, was tied in a ragged knot. She wore slippers, the
upper parts of which still adhered to the soles only by miracle. It
looked very much as if the same relation subsisted between her frame
and the life that informed it, for there was no blood in her cheeks,
no lustre in her eye. The baby at her bosom moaned in the act of
sucking; one knew not how the poor woman could supply sustenance to
another being.
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