Chapter 48
MR. CHRISTOPHER. On the Sunday evening, the last before she was to leave for Yrndale, Hester had gone to see a poor woman in a house she had not been in before, and was walking up the dismal stair, dark and dirty, when she heard a moaning from a room the door of which was a little open. She peeped in, and saw on a low bed a poor woman, old, yellow, and wrinkled, apparently at the point of death. Her throat was bare, and she saw the muscles of it knotted in the struggle for life.--Is not death the victorious struggle for life?--She was not alone; a man knelt by her bedside, his arm under the pillow to hold her head higher, and his other hand clasping hers. "The darkness! the darkness!" moaned the woman. "You feel lonely?" said the voice of the man, low, and broken with sympathy. "All, a
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