ill at seven o'clock in the
morning. There is an hour for dinner at noon, and the mill hands
are released at five o'clock in the afternoon in winter and six in
summer. What will the Dragon do all the time its mother is spinning
silk? You cannot have the creature here--and away, who will care
for it? Who feed it?"

"I had thought of leaving my baby at Mrs. Chivers'."

"That is nonsense," said the silk weaver. "The Dragon won't be
spoon-fed. Its life depends on its getting its proper, natural
nourishment. So that won't do. As for having it here--that's an
impossibility. Much you would attend to the spindles when the
Dragon was bellowing. Besides, it would distract the other girls.
So you see, this won't do. And there are other reasons. I couldn't
receive you without your husband's consent. But the Dragon remains
as the insuperable difficulty. Fiddle-de-dee, Matabel! Don't think
of it. For your own sake, for the Dragon's sake, I say it won't do."

CHAPTER XL.

BY THE HAMMER POND.

Discouraged at her lack of success, Mehetabel now turned her steps
towards Thursley. She was sick at heart. It seemed to her as if
every door of escape from her wretched condition was shut against
her.

She ascended the dip in the Common through which the stream ran
that fed the Hammer ponds, and after leaving the sheet of water
that supplied the silk mill, reached a brake of willow and bramble,
through which the stream made its way from the upper pond.

The soil was resolved into mud, and oozed with springs; at the
sides broke out veins of red chalybeate water, of the color of
brick.

She started teal, that went away with a rush and frightened her
child, which cried out, and fell into sobs.

Then before her rose a huge embankment; with a sluice at the top
over which the pond decanted and the overflow was carried a little
way through a culvert, beneath a mound on which once had stood the
smelting furnace, and which now dribbled forth rust-stained springs.

The bank had to be surmounted, and in Mehetabel's condition it
taxed her powers, and when she reached the top she sank out of
breath on a fallen bole of a tree. Here she rested, with the child
in her lap, and her head in her hand. Whither should she go? To
whom betake herself? She had not a friend in the world save Iver,
and it was not possible for her to appeal to him.

Now, in her desolation, she understood what it was to be without a
relative. Every one else had some