w full well how any such project must have struck her if placed
in the bereaved mother's position. Phoebe, however, made no immediate
answer. Her sorrowful eyes were fixed on the child, now sitting happily
on the elder woman's lap.

"A nice li'l thing, wi' a wunnerful curly head--eh, Phoebe? Seems more
'n chance to me, comin' as it have on this night-black day. An' like our
li'l angel, tu, in a way?" asked Will.

"Like him--in a way, but more like you," she answered; "more like you
than your awn was--terrible straange that--the living daps o' Will!
Ban't it?"

Damaris regarded her son and then the child.

"He be like--very," she admitted. "I see him strong. An' to think he
found the bwoy 'pon that identical spot wheer he fust drawed breath
himself!"

"'Tis a thing of hidden meaning," declared Will. "An' he looked at me
kindly fust he seed me; 'twas awnly hunger made un shout--not no fear o'
me. My heart warmed to un as I told 'e. An' to come this day!"

Phoebe had taken the child, and was looking over its body in a
half-dazed fashion for the baby marks she knew. Silently she completed
the survey, but there was neither caress in her fingers nor softness in
her eyes. Presently she put the child back on Mrs. Blanchard's lap and
spoke, still regarding it with a sort of dull, almost vindictive
astonishment.

"Terrible coorious! Ban't no child as ever I seed or heard tell of; an'
nothin' of my dead lamb 'bout it, now I scans closer. But so like to
Will! God! I can see un lookin' out o' its baaby eyes!"

BOOK IV

HIS SECRET

CHAPTER I

A WANDERER RETURNS

Ripe hay swelled in many a silver-russet billow, all brightened by the
warm red of sorrel under sunshine. When the wind blew, ripples raced
over the bending grasses, and from their midst shone out mauve scabious
and flashed occasional poppies. The hot July air trembled agleam with
shining insects, and drowsily over the hayfield, punctuated by
stridulation of innumerable grasshoppers, there throbbed one sustained
murmur, like the remote and mellow music of wood and strings. A lark
still sang, and the swallows, whose full-fledged young thrust open beaks
from the nests under Newtake eaves, skimmed and twittered above the
grass lands, or sometimes dipped a purple wing in the still water where
the irises grew.

Blanchard and young Ted Chown had set about their annual labour of
saving the hay, and now a rhythmic breathing of two scythes and merry
clink