fant, but Davy
could not laugh, and Jenny's eyes were streaming.

"Betty lived at Michael, ma'am, and died when her baby was suckling.
There wasn't no feeding-bottles in them days, and the little one was
missing the poor dead mawther mortal. But babies is like lammies, ma'am,
they've got their season, and mostly all the women of the parish had
babies that year. So first one woman would whip up Betty's baby and
give it a taste of the breast, and then another would whip it up and
do likewise, until the little baby cuckoo was in every baby nest in the
place, and living all over the street, like the rum-butter bowl and the
preserving pan. But no use at all, at all. The little mite wasted away.
Poor thing, poor thing. Twenty mawthers wasn't making up to it for the
right one it had lost. That's me, ma'am; that's me."

Jenny Crow went away, crying openly, having promised to be a party to
the innocent deception which Captain Davy had suggested. "That Nelly
Kinvig is as hard as a flint," she told herself, bitterly. "I've no
patience with such flinty people; and won't I give it her piping hot at
the very next opportunity?"

CHAPTER V.

Jenny's opportunity was a week in coming, and various events of some
consequence in this history occurred in the mean time. The first of
these was that Capt'n Davy's fortune changed hands.

Davy's savings had been invested in two securities--the Liverpool Dock
Trust and Dumbell's Manx Bank. His property in the former he made over
by help of the advocates, and with vast show of secrecy, to the name of
Jenny Crow; and she, on her part, by help of other advocates, and with
yet more real secrecy, transferred it to the name of Mrs. Quiggin.

The remains of his possessions in the latter he lost to Lovibond, who
gambled with him constantly, beginning with a sovereign, which Mrs.
Quiggin had lent him for the purpose, and going on by a process of
doubling until the stakes were prodigious. Every night he discharged his
debt by check on Dumbell's, and every morning Lovibond repaid it into
the same bank to the account of his wife. Thus, within a week, unknown
to either of the two persons chiefly concerned, the money which had been
the immediate cause of strife between them passed from the offender to
the offended, from the strong to the weak.

That was the more material of the changes that had come to pass, and the
more spiritual were of still greater consequence.

Lovibond and Jenny met constan