e times within the last twelve months Jane had fled
from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow
had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept
over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms
of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older
children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves
in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring
in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane
must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever
happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making
love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had
engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had
fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress,
Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good,"
moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
hemming.

Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast
with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent
tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,
like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost
white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,
stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep
blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his
starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with
a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.

"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a
resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.

"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes
from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had
dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she
defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my
fault," she said.

"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined
Gabriella with spirit.

"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution
hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. M