at afternoon to be alive. In that
northern district although summer came late she made up for it by the
extreme beauty with which she clothed the landscape; the view from the
hill-side was like one of Turner's pictures.

As the girls sat chatting, watching the ponies, and idly plucking
flowers, they heard footsteps coming along the road, and presently a
woman carrying a baby appeared round the corner. She was young and dark
and gipsy-looking, and wore large ear-rings and a red cotton
handkerchief knotted loosely round her brown throat. She stopped at the
sight of Diana and Wendy and the ponies, and seemed to consider a
moment. Then she walked boldly up to them, looked keenly in their faces,
and evidently chose Diana.

"Could you do me a kindness, miss?" she asked. "I've to go up to the
farm for a basket. I don't want to carry the baby with me; she's so
heavy. If I leave her here on the grass would you keep an eye on her
till I come back? I shan't be gone five minutes."

Now Diana was fond of babies, and the little dark-eyed specimen, wrapped
up in the plaid shawl, was pretty and attractive and fairly clean. For
answer she held out her arms, received baby, shawl, and feeding-bottle
on to her knee, and constituted herself temporary nurse.

"She'll be good till I come back," said the woman, turning up the lane
that led to the farm.

The small person with the brown eyes was probably accustomed to be
handed about. She did not jib at strangers, as might have been expected,
but accepted the situation quite amiably. She gurgled in response to
Diana's advances, and allowed herself to be amused. Perhaps the vicinity
of horses was familiar to her, and she felt at home. Diana, hugging her
on her knee, freed her from the folds of the shawl and allowed her to
kick happily. She was certainly a fascinating little mortal.

In the course of about ten minutes Miss Carr, who had been having a
chat at the farm about gardening prospects, returned leisurely down the
lane, and was electrified to find Diana sitting by the roadside nursing
a baby.

"I didn't see any gipsy woman come up to the farm," she said, in answer
to the girls' explanations. "You'd better go, Wendy, and see if you can
find her, and tell her to come at once and fetch her baby."

So Wendy went up the lane to the farm, and asked at the front door and
the back door, and looked round the stack-yard and the buildings, but
there was never a trace of the gipsy girl. A litt