Madge asked:  ‘But, my lady, who is to do it?’

‘You would do it, dear, if I shrank,’ her mistress replied.

’Oh, my lady, I don’t know, I can’t say.  Burning a child!  And there’s our baby.’

‘He has had me nearly his time.’

‘Oh, my dear lady!  Would the mother consent?’

’My Madge!  I have so few of their words yet.  You would hold the child to save it from a dreadful end.’

’God help me, my lady—­I would, as long as I live I will . . . .  Oh! poor infant, we do need our courage now.’

Seeing that her mistress had not a tear or a tremor, the girl blinked and schooled her quailing heart, still under the wicked hope that the mother would not consent; in a wonderment at this lady, who was womanly, and who could hold the red iron at living flesh, to save the poor infant from a dreadful end.  Her flow of love to this dear lady felt the slicing of a cut; was half revulsion, half worship; uttermost worship in estrangement, with the further throbbing of her pulses.

The cottage door was pushed open for Lord Fleetwood and Howell Edwards, whom his master had prepared to stand against immediate operations.  A mounted messenger had been despatched.  But it was true, the doctor might not be at home.  Assuming it to be a bite of rabies, minutes lost meant the terrible:  Edwards bowed his head to that.  On the other hand, he foresaw the closest of personal reasons for hesitating to be in agreement with the lady wholly.  The countess was not so much a persuasive lady as she was, in her breath and gaze, a sweeping and a wafting power.  After a short argument, he had the sense of hanging like a bank detached to fatality of motion by the crack of a landslip, and that he would speedily be on his manhood to volunteer for the terrible work.

He addressed the mother.  Her eyes whitened from their red at his first word of laying hot iron on the child:  she ran out with the wild woman’s howl to her neighbours.

‘Poor mother!’ Carinthia sighed.  ’It may last a year in the child’s body, and one day he shudders at water.  Father saw a bitten man die.  I could fear death with the thought of that poison in me.  I pray Dr. Griffiths may come.’

Fleetwood shuffled a step.  ‘He will come, he will come.’

The mother and some women now packed the room.

A gabble arose between them and Edwards.  They fired sharp snatches of speech, and they darted looks at the lady and her lord.

‘They do not know!’ said Carinthia.

Gower brought her news that the dog had been killed; Martha and her precious burden were outside, a mob of men, too.  He was not alarmed; but she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened.  At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to the shrill vowels.