ng, perhaps, in some dirty gypsy van
put up on some bit of waste land by the roadside, or, perhaps,
surrounded by the noise and glare of the fair with its shows and
roundabouts. His little Zoe! he could not possibly have been so
utterly deceived all through; the baby who had lain on his bed, whose
little face he had felt as he carried her up to the Grays' cottage in
the dark, whom he had seen day after day, and never failed to notice
the likeness, growing stronger with the child's growth. Was it all a
delusion? all the foolish fancy of a fond, old man? He tried hard to
believe that it was impossible that he could have been so deceived, and
yet from the very first he felt that it was so, and that the love that
had been growing in his heart all these months had been lavished on a
gypsy baby whose face most likely he should never see again.

And all his plans for the future, his dreams of reparation, of tender
reconciliation with Edith, and of happy, peaceful days that would
obliterate the memory of past trouble and alienation, they had all
vanished with the gypsy baby; life was as empty as the cradle by Mrs
Gray's side.

Where was he to find his daughter? Where had she wandered that night
when the pitiless rain fell and the sullen wind moaned? Was that the
last he should ever see of her, with the white, wan, pleading face
under the yew-tree? And would that despairing voice, saying 'Father!'
haunt his ears till his dying day? And would the wailing cry that
followed him as he went to his house that night be the only thing he
should ever know of his grandchild, the real little Zoe whom he had
rejected?

He was several miles away along the Smithurst road when he first
realised what he was doing, brought to the consciousness, perhaps, by
the fact of being weary and footsore and wet through from a fine rain
that had begun falling soon after he left the village. It must be
getting late too; many of the cottages he passed showed no light from
the windows, the inmates most likely being in bed.

Painfully and wearily he toiled back to Downside; he seemed to have no
spirit left to contend against even such trifling things as mud and
inequalities in the road, and when a bramble straying from the hedge
caught his coat and tore it, he could almost have cried in feeble
vexation of spirit. Downside street was all dark and quiet, but from
the organist's house a light shone out from the open door and down the
garden path, mak