brain for
minutes before he could find utterance. The smell of an abundant supper
his mother had set out for him choked him.

When he had at last spoken--told of the blow Farmer Day had struck, of
his wife's deed, and commanded that all the men that could be collected
should turn out to seek for the child--he was astonished at finding sobs
in the tones of his words. He became oblivious for the moment of his
parents, and leaned his face against the wooden wall of the room in a
convulsion of nervous feeling that was weeping without tears.

It did not in the least surprise his parents that he should cry--he was
only a child in their eyes. While the father bestirred himself to get a
cart and lanterns and men, the mother soothed her son, or, rather, she
addressed to him such kindly attentions as she supposed were soothing to
him. She did not know that her attention to his physical comfort hardly
entered his consciousness.

Caius went out again that night with those who went to examine the spot,
and test the current, and search the dark shores. He went again, with a
party of neighbours, to the same place, in the first faint pink flush of
dawn, to seek up and down the sands and rocks left bare by the tide.
They did not find the body of the child.

CHAPTER IV.

A QUIET LIFE.

In the night, while the men were seeking the murdered child, there were
kindly women who went to the house of the farmer Day to tend his wife.
The elder children had been found asleep in a field, where, after
wandering a little while, they had succumbed to the influence of some
drug, which had evidently been given them by the mother to facilitate
her evil design. She herself, poor woman, had grown calm again, her
frenzy leaving her to a duller phase of madness. That she was mad no one
doubted. How long she might have been walking in the misleading paths of
wild fancy, whether her insane vagaries had been the cause or the result
of her husband's churlishness, no one knew. The husband was a taciturn
man, and appeared to sulk under the scrutiny of the neighbourhood. The
more charitable ascribed his demeanour to sorrow. The punishment his
wife had meted out for the blow he struck her had, without doubt, been
severe.

As for Caius Simpson, his mind was sore concerning the little girl. It
was as if his nature, in one part of it, had received a bruise that did
not heal. The child had pleased his fancy. All the sentiment in him
centred round the