I have long seen there was something worrying you.
But Saturday and Monday--they used to be your bright days." "It will come to that, I suppose," said Henry, evading her last observation.

"Yes," said he, wearily, "it will come to that." And he sighed so piteously that she forbore to press him.

She had not the heart to cross-examine her suffering child.
That evening, mother and son sat silent by the fire: Henry had his own sad and bitter thoughts; and Mrs.Little was now brooding over the words Henry had spoken in the afternoon; and presently her maternal anxieties found a copious vent.

She related to him, one after another, all the outrages that had been perpetrated in Hillsborough, while he was a child, and had been, each in its turn, the town talk.
It was a subject on which, if her son had been older, and more experienced in her sex, he would have closed her mouth promptly, she being a woman whose own nerves had received so frightful a shock by the manner of her husband's death.

But, inadvertently, he let her run on, till she told him how a poor grinder had been carried home to his wife, blinded and scorched with gunpowder, and another had been taken home, all bleeding, to his mother, so beaten and bruised with life-preservers, that he had laid between life and death for nine days, and never uttered one word all that time, in reply to all her prayers and tears.
Now Mrs.Little began these horrible narratives with a forced and unnatural calmness; but, by the time she got to the last; she had worked herself up to a paroxysm of sympathy with other wretched women in Hillsborough, and trembled all over, like one in an ague, for herself: and at last stretched out her shaking hands, and screamed to him, "Oh, Harry, Harry, have pity on your miserable mother! Think what these eyes of mine have seen--bleeding at my feet--there--there--I see it now"-- (her eyes dilated terribly at the word)--"oh, promise me, for pity's sake, that these--same--eyes--shall never see YOU brought and laid down bleeding like HIM!" With this she went into violent hysterics, and frightened her son more than all the ruffians in the town had ever frightened him.
She was a long time in this pitiable condition, and he nursed her: but at last her convulsion ceased, and her head rested on her son's shoulder in a pitiable languor.
Henry was always a good son: but he never loved his mother so tenderly as he did this night.