“I’m coming,” said Mrs Hankworth, rising slowly.  “If there’s anything you need, any advice or that, I’ll be very pleased to give it you.  Let me give him a kiss.”  “You’re a beauty, that’s what you are,” she said, kissing the baby and giving it back to Mary.

“I must go too,” said Mrs Crowther.  “I’ll send down some old flannel to-morrow, Anne.  One of my girls’ll come in and help you sometimes.  It’s well they should get used to a baby.”

“She’ll not be able to stop away herself,” said Mrs Hankworth, shrewdly, and laughing together, both women went out, disputing amiably as to whether Mrs Crowther would take a seat in the trap and be driven as far as the cross roads.

The blind woman was feeling carefully the downy head of the baby.

“He’s as soft as a kitten,” she said.  “I could spare several eggs a week out of the basket,” she added, “if they’d be any use.  I don’t know much about babies.  My brother was bigger than me when we was at home, and, of course, since then I’ve not had much to do with children.”

Anne watched the two so helpless and confident.  Mary rocked her knees steadily, and the child’s head lay contentedly.

“I believe you’ve put him to sleep,” said Anne.  “Shall I put him in the cradle?”

“No, let me have him,” said Mary, “I’ve never nursed a baby before.”

CHAPTER XXI

Anne was left alone in the cottage with the baby, who slept in the clothes-basket she had turned into a cradle.  The dog slept, too, having made friends with fortune.  A late evening glow lit one side of the wall.  When it faded, the dusk would absorb all the room and its inhabitants.  Anne, sitting very still lest she should wake the baby, remembered one by one the agonies that had been lived through, whose sole result seemed to be this peaceful evening and the confidently breathing child.  She remembered the shock of the disgrace to her, she, who had been a friend of the grandmother’s, and how she had carried the burden about.  She remembered the new house, and Jane, pretty, spoiled, and without misgiving, caring nothing for the hard judgments of which she herself imbibed the bitterness.  Then Jane, with the child already striving to be free, leaving the new house at night, knowing without being told what door was open to her of all the doors in the country, and what place she would henceforth take.  She saw the girl again, seated by the fire in the Infirmary ward, with that strange division between herself and all living, removed, as it were, to a distance which could not be bridged.  Then Jane was no more to be found.  There was the boy-child instead, who knew nothing except his desire to be kept alive; who met all reservations and pity by a determination to be fed.  Throughout the whole evening, Anne had been struck by the fact that the other women scarcely thought of Jane any more than the baby did.  It remained to them a very simple