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“Let me be, Sybil Stanley, and let me speak. I says again, what has fine folk to do with coming and worriting us in our wood? If I did sell him, I sold him fair–and if I got him back, I bought him back fair. Aye my delicate gentlewoman, you may look at me, but I did!

“Five years, five years of wind and weather, and hard days and lonely nights:–

“Five years of food your men would chuck to the pigs, and of clothes your maids would think scorn to scour in:–

“Five years–but I scraped it together, and then they baulked me. You shuts the door in the poor tinker-woman’s face; you gives the words of warning to the police.

“Five more years–it was five more, wasn’t it, my daughter?–Sometimes I fancies I makes a mistake and overcounts. But, he’ll know. Christian, my dear! Christian, I say!”

“Sit down, Mother, sit down,” said the gipsy girl; and the old woman sat down, but she went on muttering,–

“I will speak! What has they to do, I say, to ask me where he has gone to? A fine place for the fine gentleman they made of him. What has such as them to say to it, if I couldn’t keep him when I got him–that they comes to taunt me and my grey hairs?”

She wrung her grey locks with a passionate gesture as she spoke, and then dropped her elbows on her knees and her head upon her hands.

The clergywoman had been standing very still, with her two white hands folded before her, and her eyes, that had dark circles round them which made them look large, fixed upon the tinker-mother, as she muttered; but when she ceased muttering the clergywoman unlocked her hands, and with one movement took off her hat. Her hair was smoothly drawn over the roundness of her head, and gathered in a knot at the back of her neck, and the brown of it was all streaked with grey. She threw her hat on to the grass, and moving swiftly to the old woman’s side, she knelt by her, as we had seen Sybil kneel, speaking very clearly, and, touching the tinker-mother’s hand.

“Christian’s grandmother–you are his grandmother, are you not?–you must be much, much older than me, but look at my hair. Am I likely to taunt any one with having grown grey or with being miserable? It takes a good deal of pain, good mother, to make young hair as white as mine.”

“So it should,” muttered the old woman, “so it should. It is a plaguy world, I say, as it is; but it would be plaguy past any bearing for the poor, if them that has everything could do just as they likes and never feel no aches nor pains afterwards. And there’s a many fine gentlefolk thinks they can, till they feels the difference.

“‘What’s ten pound to me?’ says you. ‘I wants the pretty baby with the dark eyes and the long lashes,’ says you.

“‘Them it belongs to is poor, they’d sell anything,’ says you.

“‘I wants a son,’ you says; ‘and having the advantages of gold and silver, I can buy one.’

“You calls him by a name of your own choosing, and puts your own name at the end of that. His hands are something dark for the son of such a delicate white lady-mother, but they can be covered with the kid gloves of gentility.

“You buys fine clothes for him, and nurses and tutors and schools for him.

“You teaches him the speech of gentlefolk, and the airs of gentlefolk, and the learning of gentlefolk.

“You crams his head with religion, which is a thing I doesn’t hold with, and with holy words, which I thinks brings ill-luck.

“You has the advantages of silver and gold, to make a fine gentleman of him, but the blood that flies to his face when he hears the words of insult is gipsy blood, and he comes back to the woods where he was born.