“What do ’e say, Phoebe?” asked Mrs. Blanchard, somewhat apprehensively.  She knew full well how any such project must have struck her if placed in the bereaved mother’s position.  Phoebe, however, made no immediate answer.  Her sorrowful eyes were fixed on the child, now sitting happily on the elder woman’s lap.

“A nice li’l thing, wi’ a wunnerful curly head—­eh, Phoebe?  Seems more ‘n chance to me, comin’ as it have on this night-black day.  An’ like our li’l angel, tu, in a way?” asked Will.

“Like him—­in a way, but more like you,” she answered; “more like you than your awn was—­terrible straange that—­the living daps o’ Will!  Ban’t it?”

Damaris regarded her son and then the child.

“He be like—­very,” she admitted.  “I see him strong.  An’ to think he found the bwoy ’pon that identical spot wheer he fust drawed breath himself!”

“‘Tis a thing of hidden meaning,” declared Will.  “An’ he looked at me kindly fust he seed me; ‘twas awnly hunger made un shout—­not no fear o’ me.  My heart warmed to un as I told ‘e.  An’ to come this day!”

Phoebe had taken the child, and was looking over its body in a half-dazed fashion for the baby marks she knew.  Silently she completed the survey, but there was neither caress in her fingers nor softness in her eyes.  Presently she put the child back on Mrs. Blanchard’s lap and spoke, still regarding it with a sort of dull, almost vindictive astonishment.

“Terrible coorious!  Ban’t no child as ever I seed or heard tell of; an’ nothin’ of my dead lamb ’bout it, now I scans closer.  But so like to Will!  God!  I can see un lookin’ out o’ its baaby eyes!”

BOOK IV

HIS SECRET

CHAPTER I

A WANDERER RETURNS

Ripe hay swelled in many a silver-russet billow, all brightened by the warm red of sorrel under sunshine.  When the wind blew, ripples raced over the bending grasses, and from their midst shone out mauve scabious and flashed occasional poppies.  The hot July air trembled agleam with shining insects, and drowsily over the hayfield, punctuated by stridulation of innumerable grasshoppers, there throbbed one sustained murmur, like the remote and mellow music of wood and strings.  A lark still sang, and the swallows, whose full-fledged young thrust open beaks from the nests under Newtake eaves, skimmed and twittered above the grass lands, or sometimes dipped a purple wing in the still water where the irises grew.

Blanchard and young Ted Chown had set about their annual labour of saving the hay, and now a rhythmic breathing of two scythes and merry clink of whetstones against steel sounded afar on the sleepy summer air.  The familiar music came to Phoebe’s ear where she sat at an open kitchen window of Newtake.  Her custom was at times of hay harvest to assist in the drying of the grass, and few women handled a fork better; but there had recently reached the farm an infant girl, and the mother had plenty to do without seeking beyond her cradle.