ch the old woman replied in a whine so much moderated, that though
Mrs. Hedgehog and I strained our ears, and crept as near the group as we
dared, we could not catch a word.

Only, after a while Sybil rose up and walked back slowly to the fire,
twisting the long lock of her hair as before, and saying--"I turns him
round my finger, mother, as far as _that_ goes--"

"So you thinks," said the old crone. "But he never will--even if you
would, Sybil Stanley! Oh Christian, my child, my child!"

The gipsy girl stood still, like a young poplar-tree in the dead calm
before thunder; and there fell a silence, in which I dared not have
moved myself, or allowed Mrs. Hedgehog to move, three steps through the
softest grass, for fear of being heard.

Then Sybil said abruptly, "I've never rightly heard about Christian,
mother. What was it made you think so much more of him than you thinks
about the others?"

CHAPTER IV.

"My son's first wife died after Christian was born," said the old woman.
"I've a sharp tongue, as you know, Sybil Stanley, and I'm doubtful if
she was too happy while she lived; but when she was gone I knew she'd
been a good 'un, and I've always spoken of her accordingly.

"You're too young to remember that year; it was a year of slack trade
and hard times all over. Farmer-folk grudged you fourpence to mend the
kettle, and as to broken victuals, there wasn't as much went in at the
front door to feed the family, as the servants would have thrown out at
the back door another year to feed the pigs.

"When one gets old, my daughter, and sits over the fire at night and
thinks, instead of tramping all day and sleeping heavy after it, as one
does when one is young--things comes back; things comes back, I say, as
they says ghosts does.

"And when we camps near trees with long branches, like them over there,
that waves in the wind and confuses your eyes among the smoke, I
sometimes think I sees her face, as it was before she died, with a
pinched look across the nose. That is Christian's mother, my son's first
wife; and it comes back to me that I believes she starved herself to let
him have more; for he's a man with a surly temper, like my own, is my
son George. He grumbled worse than the children when he was hungry, and
because she was so slow in getting strong enough to stand on her legs
and carry the basket. You see he didn't hold his tongue when things were
bad to bear, as she could. Men doesn't, my daughter