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“I did, my daughter. I left him in the arms of the young clergywoman with the politest of words on both sides, and a good deal of religious conversation from the parson, which I does not doubt was well meant, if it was somewhat tedious.”

“And then–mother?”

“And then we moved to Banbury, where my son took his second wife, having made her acquaintance in an alehouse; and then, my daughter, I begins to know that Christian’s mother had been a good ‘un.”

“George isn’t as happy with this one, then?”

“Men are curious creatures, my daughter, as you will discover for your own part without any instructions from me. He treats her far better than the other, because she treats him so much worse. But between them they soon put me a-one-side, and when I sat long evenings alone, sometimes in a wood, as it might be this, where the branches waves and makes a confusion of the shadows–and sometimes on the edge of a Hampshire heath where we camps a good deal, and the light is as slow in dying out of the bottom of the sky as he and she are in coming home, and the bits of water looks as if people had drownded themselves in them–when I sat alone, I say, minding the fire and the children–I wondered if Christian had lived, till I was all but mad with wondering and coming no nearer to knowing.

“‘His mother was a good daughter to you,’ I thinks; ‘and if you hadn’t sold him–sold your own flesh and blood–for ten golden sovereigns to the clergywoman, he might have been a good son to your old age.’

“At last I could bear idleness and the lone company of my own thoughts no longer, my daughter, and I sets off to travel on my own account, taking money at back-doors, and living on broken meats I begged into the bargain, and working at nights instead of thinking. I knows a few arts, my daughter, of one sort and another, and I puts away most of what I takes, and changes it when the copper comes to silver, and the silver comes to gold.”

“I wonder you never went to see if he was alive,” said Sybil.

“I did, my daughter. I went several times under various disguisements, which are no difficulty to those who know how to adopt them, and with servant’s jewellery and children’s toys, I had sight of him more than once, and each time made me wilder to get him back.”

“And you never tried?”

“The money was not ready. One must act honourably, my daughter. I couldn’t pick up my own grandson as if he’d been a stray hen, or a few clothes off the line. It took me five years to save those ten pounds. Five long miserable years.”

“Miserable!” cried the gipsy girl, flinging her hair back from her eyes. “Miserable! Happy, you mean; too happy! It is when one can do nothing–“

She stopped, as if talking choked her, and the old woman, who seemed to pay little attention to any one but herself, went on,

“It was when it was all but saved, and I hangs about that country, making up my plans, that he comes to me himself, as I sits on the outskirts of a wood beyond the village, in no manner of disguisement, but just as I sits here.”

“He came to you?” said Sybil.

“He comes to me, my daughter; dressed like any young nobleman of eight years old, but bareheaded and barefooted, having his cap in one hand, and his boots and stockings in the other.

“‘Good-morning, old gipsy woman,’ says he. ‘I heard there was an old gipsy woman in the wood; so I came to see. Nurse said if I went about in the fields, by myself, the gipsies would steal me; but I told her I didn’t care if they did, because it must be so nice to live in a wood, and sleep out of doors all night. When I grow up, I mean to be a wild man on a desert island, and dress in goats’ skins. I sha’n’t wear hats–I hate them; and I don’t like shoes and stockings either. When I can get away from Nurse, I always take them off. I like to feel what I’m walking on, and in the wood I like to scuffle with my toes in the dead leaves. There’s a quarry at the top of this wood, and I should so have liked to have thrown my shoes and stockings and my cap into it; but it vexes mother when I destroy my clothes, so I didn’t, and I am carrying them.’