“Only a little cordial, ma’am, nothing more; it keeps it sleeping; and when it sleeps it does not suffer.”

She shook her beautiful head.

“It is a bad practice,” she said; “more babes are killed by drugs than die a natural death.”

I was determined she should look at me; I stepped forward and touched the child’s face.

“Do you not think it is merciful at times to give a child like this drugs when it has to die; to lessen the pain of death—­to keep it from crying out?”

Ah, me, that startled fear that leaped into her eyes, the sudden quiver on the beautiful face.

“I do not know,” she said; “I do not understand such things.”

“What can it matter,” I said, “whether a little child like this dies conscious or not?  It cannot pray—­it must go straight to Heaven!  Do you not think anyone who loved it, and had to see it die, would think it greatest kindness to drug it?”

My eyes held hers; I would not lose their glance; she could not take them away.  I saw the fear leap into them, then die away; she was saying to herself, what could I know?

But I knew.  I remembered what the doctor said in Brighton when the inquest was held on the tiny white body, “that it had been mercifully drugged before it was drowned.”

“I cannot tell,” she replied, with a gentle shake of the head.  “I only know that unfortunately the poor people use these kind of cordials too readily.  I should not like to decide whether in a case like this it is true kindness or not.”

“What a pretty child, Mr. Ford; what a pity that it must die!”

Could it be that she who bent with such loving care over this little stranger, who touched its tiny face with her delicate lips, who held it cradled in her soft arms, was the same desperate woman who had thrown her child into the sea?

CHAPTER IX.

Mrs. Fleming was not at her ease with me.  I found her several times watching me with a curious, intent gaze, seeking, as it were, to pierce my thoughts, to dive into my motives, but always puzzled—­even as I was puzzled over her.  That round of visiting made me more loath than ever to believe that I was right.  Such gentle thought and care, such consideration, such real charity, I had never seen before.  I was not surprised when Lance told me that she was considered quite an angel by the poor.  I fell ill with anxiety.  I never knew what to say or think.

I did what many others in dire perplexity do, I went to one older, wiser and better than myself, a white-haired old minister, whom I had known for many years, and in whom I had implicit trust.  I mentioned no names, but I told him the story.

He was a kind-hearted, compassionate man, but he decided that the husband should be told.

Such a woman, he said, must have unnatural qualities; could not possibly be one fitted for any man to trust.  She might be insane.  She might be subject to mania—­a thousand things might occur which made it, he thought, quite imperative that such a secret should not be withheld from her husband.