I bent forward.  Ah! if I had doubted before, I could doubt no longer.  The little face, even in its waxen pallor, was like the beautiful one I had seen in its white despair last night.  Just the same cluster of hair, the same beautiful mouth and molded chin.  Mother and child, I knew and felt sure.  The little white garments were dripping, and some kind, motherly woman in the crowd came forward and dried the little face.

“Poor little thing!” she said; “how I should like to take those wet things off, and make it warm by a good fire!”

“It will never be warm again in this world,” said one of the boatmen.  “There is but little chance when a child has lain all night in the sea.”

“All night in the sea!” said the pitiful woman; “and my children lay so warm and comfortable in their little soft beds.  All night in the sea!  Poor little motherless thing!”

She seemed to take it quite for granted that the child must be motherless; in her loving, motherly heart she could not think of such a crime as a mother destroying her own child.  I saw that all the men who stood round the body were struck with this.

“What will be done with it?” she asked.

“It will go to the dead-house at the work-house,” said the superintendent, “and the parish will bury it.”

Then I stood forward.

“No!” I cried; “if the authorities will permit, I will take upon myself the expense of burying that little child—­it shall not have a pauper’s funeral; it shall be buried in the beautiful green cemetery in the Lewes Road, and it shall have a white marble cross at the head of its grave.”

“You are very good, sir,” said the superintendent, and the pitiful woman cried out: 

“Heaven bless you, sir!  I would do the same thing myself if I could afford it.”

“There must be an inquest,” said some one in the crowd; “we ought to know whether the child was dead before it was thrown into the water.”

“I hope to Heaven it was!” cried the woman.

And I said to myself that, if that were the case, it would not be murder—­not murder, but some mad, miserable mother’s way out of some dreadful difficulty.

Surely on the beautiful, despairing face I had not seen the brand of murder.  If the little one had been dead, that would lessen the degree of wickedness so greatly.

The woman who had dried and kissed the tiny waxen face bent over it now.

“I am sure,” she said, “that the child was alive when it touched the water.”

“How do you know?” asked the superintendent, curiously.

“Look at the face, sir, and you will see.”

“I see nothing,” he replied.

“I do,” she said.  “I see just what you would see on the face of a baby suddenly plunged into cold water.  I see the signs of faint, baby surprise.  Look at the baby brows and the little hand spread wide open.  It was living when it touched the water, I am sure of that.”