mark on the child's clothes which would lead to its
identification, and, for the next few days, every glance in his
direction, or, for the matter of that, in any other direction, was
interpreted by him as having some covert allusion to this foundling
grandchild of his; but the conversation of some men outside his
yew-hedge, which he accidentally overheard one day, set his anxiety at
rest.

From this he gathered that it was generally supposed to be a child
belonging to a gypsy caravan that had passed through the village that
day.

'And I says,' said one of the men with that slow, emphatic delivery in
which the most ordinary sentiments are given forth as if they were
wisdom unheard and undreamt of before; 'and I don't mind who hears me,
as Gray did oughter set the perlice on to 'un to find the heartless
jade as did 'un.'

'Ay, sure! so he did oughter; but he ain't on gumption, Gray ain't;
never had neither, as have known him man and boy these fifty year.'

'My missus says,' went on the first speaker, 'as she seed a gypsy gal
with just such a brat as this on her arm. She come round to parson's
back door--my Liza's kitchen gal there and telled her mother. She were
one of them dressed-up baggages with long earrings and a yeller
handkercher round her head, a-telling fortunes; coming round the poor,
silly gals with her long tongue and sly ways. She went in here, too.'
Mr Robins guessed, though he could not see the jerk of the thumb in his
direction. 'Mrs Sands told me so herself--the organist's listening was
quickened to yet sharper attention--'she says she had quite a job to
get rid of her, and thought she were after the spoons belike. But she
says as she'd know the gal again anywheres, and my missus says she'd
pretty near take her davy to the child, though as I says, one brat's
pretty much like another--haw, haw! though the women don't think it.'

And the two men parted, laughing over this excellent joke.

It was most curious how that little out-of-the-way house of the Grays
and its unremarkable inmates had suddenly become conspicuous; the very
cottage was visible from all directions--from the churchyard gate, from
the organist's garden, from various points along the Stokeley road; but
perhaps this may have been because Mr Robins had never cared to
identify one thatched roof from another hitherto. As for the Grays,
they seemed to be everywhere; that man hoeing in the turnip-field was
Gray, that boy at the head