Then Sybil said abruptly, “I’ve never rightly heard about Christian, mother.  What was it made you think so much more of him than you thinks about the others?”

CHAPTER IV.

“My son’s first wife died after Christian was born,” said the old woman.  “I’ve a sharp tongue, as you know, Sybil Stanley, and I’m doubtful if she was too happy while she lived; but when she was gone I knew she’d been a good ’un, and I’ve always spoken of her accordingly.

“You’re too young to remember that year; it was a year of slack trade and hard times all over.  Farmer-folk grudged you fourpence to mend the kettle, and as to broken victuals, there wasn’t as much went in at the front door to feed the family, as the servants would have thrown out at the back door another year to feed the pigs.

“When one gets old, my daughter, and sits over the fire at night and thinks, instead of tramping all day and sleeping heavy after it, as one does when one is young—­things comes back; things comes back, I say, as they says ghosts does.

“And when we camps near trees with long branches, like them over there, that waves in the wind and confuses your eyes among the smoke, I sometimes think I sees her face, as it was before she died, with a pinched look across the nose.  That is Christian’s mother, my son’s first wife; and it comes back to me that I believes she starved herself to let him have more; for he’s a man with a surly temper, like my own, is my son George.  He grumbled worse than the children when he was hungry, and because she was so slow in getting strong enough to stand on her legs and carry the basket.  You see he didn’t hold his tongue when things were bad to bear, as she could.  Men doesn’t, my daughter.”

“I know, I know,” said the girl.

“I thinks I was jealous of her,” muttered the old woman; “it comes back to me that I begrudged her making so much of my son, but I knows now that she was a good ’un, and I speaks of her accordingly.  She fretted herself about getting strong enough to carry the child to be christened, while we had the convenience of a parson near at hand, and I wasn’t going to oblige her; but the day after she died, the child was ailing, and thinking it might require the benefit of a burial-service as well as herself, I wrapped it up, and made myself decent, and took my way to the village.  I was half-way up the street, when I met a young gentlewoman in a grey dress coming out of a cottage.

“‘Good-day, my pretty lady,’ says I.  ’Could you show an old woman the residence of the clergyman that would do the poor tinkers the kindness of christening a sick child whose mother lies dead in a tilted cart at the meeting of the four roads?’

“‘I’m the clergyman’s wife,’ says she, with the colour in her face, ’and I’m sure my husband will christen the poor baby.  Do let me see it.’

“‘It’s only a tinker’s child,’ says I, ’a poor brown-faced morsel for a pretty lady’s blue eyes to rest upon, that’s accustomed to the delicate sight of her own golden-haired children; long may they live, and many may you and the gentle clergyman have of them!’