nd
providing for her own people, when he had thought she was full of
consideration for Edith's child. Pshaw! he had to pull himself
together and take himself to task. For even in these few days he had
grown to think of that little brown-faced, dark-eyed baby as his
grandchild, instead of Martin Blake's brat. Insensibly and naturally,
too, the child had brought back the memory of its mother, first as
baby, then as sweet and winsome little child; then as bright, wilful,
coaxing girl, and, lastly, unless he kept his thoughts well in check,
there followed on these brighter memories the shadow of a white worn
woman under the yew-tree in the churchyard, and of a voice that said
'Father.'

That uninteresting child at Stokeley apparently required a great supply
of clothes, for Jane Sands was hard at work again that evening, and
when he came in from the choir practice, he heard her singing over her
work as she used to do in old days, and when he went in for his pipe,
she looked up with a smile that seemed to expect a sympathetic
response, and made no effort to conceal the work as she had done the
day before.

He stood morosely by the fireplace for a minute, shaking the ashes out
of his pipe.

'You're very much taken up with that baby,' he said crossly; and she
looked up quickly, thinking that perhaps he had a hole in his stocking,
or a button off his shirt to complain of, as a consequence of her being
engrossed in other work. But he went on without looking at her, and
apparently deeply absorbed in getting an obstinate bit of ash out of
the pipe bowl.

'There's a child at Mrs Gray's they say is very short of clothes. That
baby, you know'----

'That baby that was found in the garden,' Jane said in such a curiously
uninterested tone of voice that he could not resist glancing round at
her; but she was just then engaged in that mysterious process of
'stroking the gathers,' which the intelligent feminine reader will
understand requires a certain attention. If this indifference were
assumed, Jane Sands was a much better actor and a more deceptive
character than he had believed possible; if she were too entirely
absorbed in her own people to give even a thought to her young
mistress's baby, she was not the Jane Sands he thought he had known for
the last twenty years. The only alternative was that she knew nothing
about the baby having been left on his door-step, nor of the meeting
with his daughter in the churchyard which