“‘I have no children,’ says she, shortly, with the colour in her face breaking up into red and white patches over her cheeks.  ’Let me carry the baby for you,’ says she, a taking it from me.  ‘You must be tired.’

“All the way she kept looking at it, and saying how pretty it was, and what beautiful long eyelashes it had, which went against me at the time, my daughter, for I knowed it was like its mother.

“The clergyman was a pleasing young gentleman of a genteel appearance, with a great deal to say for himself in the way of religion, as was right, it being his business.  ‘Name this child,’ says he, and she gives a start that nobody sees but myself.  So, thinking that the child being likely to die, there was no loss in obliging the gentlefolk, says I, looking down into the book as if I could read, ’Any name the lady thinks suitable for the poor tinker’s child;’ and says she, the colour coming up into her face, ‘Call him Christian, for he shall be one.’  So he was named Christian, a name to give no manner of displeasure to myself or to my family; it having been that of my husband’s father, who was unfortunate in a matter of horse-stealing, and died across the water.”

“What did she want with naming the baby, mother?” asked Sybil.

“I comes to that, my daughter, I comes to that, though it’s hard to speak of.  I hate myself worse than I hates the police when I thinks of it.  But ten pounds—­pieces of gold, my daughter, when half-pence were hard to come by—­and small expectation that he would outlive his mother by many days—­and a feeling against him then, for her sake, though I thinks differently now—­”

“You sold him to the clergy-folks?” said Sybil.

“Ten pieces of gold!  You never felt the pains of starvation, my daughter—­nor perhaps those of jealousy, which are worse.  The young clergywoman had no children, on which score she fretted herself; and must have fretted hard, before she begged the poor tinker’s child out of the woods.”

“What did Tinker George say?” asked the girl.

“He used a good deal of bad language, and said I might as easily have got twenty pounds as ten, if I had not been as big a fool as the child’s mother herself.  Men are strange creatures, my daughter.”

“So you left Christian with them?”

“I did, my daughter.  I left him in the arms of the young clergywoman with the politest of words on both sides, and a good deal of religious conversation from the parson, which I does not doubt was well meant, if it was somewhat tedious.”

“And then—­mother?”

“And then we moved to Banbury, where my son took his second wife, having made her acquaintance in an alehouse; and then, my daughter, I begins to know that Christian’s mother had been a good ’un.”

“George isn’t as happy with this one, then?”