's
faces about me again. And then there come a sort of fear over me--a fear
of going back home at all, after the time I'd been away. I got over
it, though, and went in a day or two. When I first laid my hand on the
churchyard gate that Mary and me used to swing on, and when I looked up
at the old house, with the gable ends just what they used to be
(though the front was new painted, and strange names was over the
shop-door)--then all my time in the wild country seem to shrivel
up somehow, and better than twenty year ago begun to be a'most like
yesterday. I'd seen father's name in the churchyard--which was no more
than I looked for; but when they told me Mary had never been brought
back, when they said she'd died many a year ago among strange people,
they cut me to the quick."

"Ah! no wonder, no wonder!"

"It was a wonder to _me,_ though. I should have laughed at any man,
if he'd told me I should be took so at hearing what I heard about her,
after all the time I'd been away. I couldn't make it out then, and I
can't now. I didn't feel like my own man, when I first set eyes on the
old place. And then to hear she was dead--it cut me, as I told you. It
cut me deeper still, when I come to tumble over the things she'd
left behind her in her box. Twenty years ago got nigher and nigher to
yesterday, with every fresh thing belonging to her that I laid a hand
on. There was a arbor in father's garden she used to be fond of working
in of evenings. I'd lost all thought of that place for more years than
I can reckon up. I called it to mind again--and called _her_ to mind
again, too, sitting and working and singing in the arbor--only with
laying holt of a bit of patchwork stuff in the bottom of her box, with
her needle and thread left sticking in it."

"Ah, dear, dear!" sighed Mrs. Peckover, "I wish I'd seen her then! She
was as happy, I dare say, as the bird on the tree. But there's one thing
I can't exactly make out yet," she added--"how did you first come to
know all about Mary's child?"

"All? There wasn't no _all_ in it, till I see the child herself. Except
knowing that the poor creeter's baby had been born alive, I knowed
nothing when I first come away from the old place in the country. Child!
I hadn't nothing of the sort in my mind, when I got back to London.
It was how to track the man as was Mary's death, that I puzzled and
worrited about in my head, at that time--"

"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Peckover, interposing to keep h