nt 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 w