. "I'm thankful to him. I have a good sop of it cut."

He waved a hand; Christian saw, at a little distance, a heap of
rushes, and, seated on it, a girl, of whose presence she had been
unaware. She was very pale, and there was a fixity of sadness about
her. Christian spoke to her, but she did not appear to notice.

"She's my daughter," said Peter Callaghan in his quiet voice. "She
wouldn't know it was to her you spoke. She's dark, the creature.
Blinded she is. She's not long that way."

"How did it happen?" said Christian, in a low voice.

"You could not say," said Peter Callaghan; his dreamy eyes roved again
over the broad river; "God left a hand on her," he said.

Christian went on her way, and the words stayed with her. "God left a
hand on her." There had been no resentment in the father's voice, only
a profound and noble gravity.

"And here am I," thought Christian, "angry and whimpering--"

Mrs. James Barry lived a mile or so farther down the river. Christian
gathered up her pack of terriers, hound puppies, and red setters, with
the farm collie to complete its absurdity, and walked fast. October
was just ending; the willows along the river-bank were yellow, the
reeds in the ditches that ran beneath each fence were greying and
withering. The successive profiles of wood and hill, down the valley
of the river went from orange and brown to a reddish purple, until, in
the large serenity of the autumn evening, they softened to the
universal blue of distance.

Mrs. Barry's farm-house stood a little back from the river. A stream
that widened to a pond, and narrowed again to a stream, divided the
house from the fields that ran between it and the river; the decent
thatched roofs and whitewashed walls of the farm, and the elm trees
that grew beside it, were mirrored in the pond. A flotilla of geese
and ducks paraded, in stately fatuity, to and fro across the mirror. A
battered little wooden bridge, painted green, enabled the people of
the farm to reach the banks of the river. Christian crossed it, and
went up to the open door of the house.

In the kitchen a red-haired woman was seated, rocking a wooden cradle
with her foot while she stitched at a child's frock. Hens, with their
alert and affected reserve of manner, stepped in and out of the
doorway, sometimes slowly, with poised claw, sometimes headlong, with
greedy speed. Christian watched them and the hound puppies (in whose
power of resistance to temptation she h