n his finger. He noticed the spring beauty round him as he had not
noticed such things for many a day, stooping to pick a big, tasselled,
gold-freckled cowslip, and stopping to let a newly-fledged, awkward,
young bird hop clumsily out of the way, with a sort of tenderness and
consideration for young things unusual to him.

His mind was more at rest than it had been for the last three weeks.
The baby's crowing laughter seemed to drive out of his memory the
wailing cry and the hollow cough and the sad, beseeching voice saying
'Father,' and then the pitiless beating rain, which had been haunting
him for the last three weeks. The sight of the baby, loved and cared
for, had taken away a misgiving, which he had hardly been conscious of
himself. After all, he had not done badly by the child. Mrs Gray was
a kind motherly sort of body, and used to babies, which Jane Sands was
not, and she would do well by the child, and he himself could see,
without any one being the wiser, that the child did not want for
anything, though he would not be held responsible in any way for it.

CHAPTER V.

Jane Hard at Work--Clothes for the Baby--Jane Returns--Jane Singing
over her Work--Jane's Selfish Absorption--For a Poor Person's
Child--The Organist in Church

There was one thing that puzzled Mr Robins extremely, and this was Jane
Sands' behaviour. He was convinced that she had been a party to the
trick that had been played off on him, and she was evidently full of
some secret trouble and anxiety, for which he could only account by
attributing it to her disappointment about the baby, and perhaps
distrust of the care that would be taken of it by others.

Mr Robins often discovered her in tears, and she was constantly going
out for hours at a time, having always hitherto been almost too much of
a stay-at-home. He suspected that these lengthened absences meant
visits to the Grays' cottage, and that baby-worship that women find so
delightful; but he found out accidentally that she had never been near
the cottage since the baby's arrival, and when he made an excuse of
sending a book by her to Bill to get her to go there, she met the boy
at the bottom of the lane, and did not go on to the cottage.

As to what he had overheard the men saying about the gypsy girl, he
felt sure that Jane had only said this to put people on the wrong
scent, though, certainly, deception of any sort was very unlike her.
Once he found her sitting up late