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"It is as fit for me as for a child, anyhow," she said. "Do listen." It was certainly no time for expostulation. All the mother was awake in Ethelwyn's bosom. It would have been cruelty to make her go in, though she was indeed ill-fitted to encounter such a night-wind. Another wail reached us. It seemed to come from a thicket at one corner of the lawn. We hurried thither.
We went to bed again, and the forsaken child of some half-animal mother, now perhaps asleep in some filthy lodging for tramps, lay in my Ethelwyn's bosom. I loved her the more for it; though, I confess, it would have been very painful to me had she shown it possible for her to treat the baby otherwise, especially after what we had been talking about that same evening.
She got her to take a few spoonfuls of milk and water, and then the little thing fell fast asleep. Ethelwyn's nursing days were not so far gone by that she did not know where her baby's clothes were. She gave me the child, and going to a wardrobe in the room brought out some night-things, and put them on.
It had rained in the afternoon, a cold drizzly rain, so Nancy had lighted a little snapping wood-fire in Grandmother Van Stark's sitting-room. Into this opened the sleeping room in which was Ethelwyn's small bed, and the big mahogany tester bed, where Grandmother Van Stark had slept for more years than Ethelwyn could imagine. Ethelwyn put Johnny Bear and his basket in front of the grate.
"Dresses are a bother, and always getting torn, and traveling makes you very tired, only the luncheon's nice. But I'd lots rather build a home." "Let's see," said mother, "if you are as ready to give up something now. Elizabeth's birthday is next week and Ethelwyn's next month. I had thought we might take a short yachting trip, all of us, Nan, Aunty Stevens "
Flaharty was hanging the white clothes on the line, and, by reason of her exceeding interest in the proceedings, she took her time about it too. In the midst of Ethelwyn's recitation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," she paused to say, after, "The eager children cry," "What do you s'pose the silly things cried for?"
Then looking back, she saw how wilfully she had shut her eyes to Ethelwyn's faults, plain enough to everyone else. That was all over now: she had broken something beside the mandarin that day, and that was Pennie's belief in her.
O, that poor baby! how it was frowned upon, and how it had heads shaken over it, just because it was not Ethelwyn's baby! It could not help that, poor darling! "Of course, you'll give information to the police," said, I am sorry to say, one of my brethren in the neighbourhood, who had the misfortune to be a magistrate as well. "Why?" I asked. "Why! That they may discover the parents, to be sure."
"She ought to go to the workhouse," said the magistrate a friendly, good-natured man enough in ordinary and rising, he took his hat and departed. This man had no children. So he was or was not, so much to blame. Which? I say the latter. Some of Ethelwyn's friends were no less positive about her duty in the affair. I happened to go into the drawing-room during the visit of one of them Miss Bowdler.
Now it happened that this suggestion of Miss Unity's came at a wonderfully convenient moment; for it had been arranged already that Ethelwyn's governess should meet her at the Nearminster station in three days' time, and take her back to London.
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