How was she going to get through the next two days?  This was provided for.  Baby was a bad sleeper.  That night he cried as he had never cried before.  Not violently; he was too weak for that, but with a sound like the tongue-tied whimper of some tiny animal.  Swinny had slept through worse noise many a night.  Now he cried from midnight to cock-crow; and on Tuesday morning Swinny was crying too.  He had had one of his “little attacks,” after which he began to show signs of rapid wasting.

He had got something which Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never heard of—­“marasmus,” the doctor called it.  She hoped it was nothing very bad.

Then the truth came out piecemeal, through Swinny’s confession and the witness of her fellow-servants.  The wretched woman’s movements had been wholly determined by the movements of Pinker; and she had been in the habit of leaving the child in the servants’ hall, where the cook, being an affectionate motherly woman, made much of him, and fed him with strange food.  He had had an “attack” the last time she did this, and Swinny, who valued her place for more reasons than one, had been afraid to say anything about it.  Preoccupied with her great passion, she had been insensible to the signs of sickness that showed themselves from day to day.  In other words, there had been shameful, pitiful neglect.

Terrified and repentant, Swinny confessed, and became faithful again.  She sat up all night with the child wrapped in blankets in her lap.  She left nothing for his mother to do but to sit and look at him, or go softly to and fro, warming blankets. (It was odd, but Mrs. Nevill Tyson never questioned the woman’s right to exclusive possession of the child.) She had written to Nevill by the first post to tell him of his son’s illness.  That gave him time to answer the same night.

Wednesday came.  There was no answer to her letter; and the baby was worse.  The doctor doubted if he would pull through.

Mrs. Wilcox was asked to break the news to her daughter.  She literally broke it.  That is to say, she presented it in such disjointed fragments that it would have puzzled a wiser head than Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s to make out the truth.  Mrs. Wilcox had been much distressed by Molly’s strange indifference to her maternal claims; but when you came to think of it, it was a very good thing that she had not cared more for the child, if she was not to keep him.  All the same, Mrs. Wilcox knew that she had an extremely disagreeable task to perform.

They were in the porch at Thorneytoft, the bare white porch that stared out over the fields, and down the great granite road to London.  As Mrs. Nevill Tyson listened she leaned against the wall, with her hands clasped in front or her and her head thrown back to stop her tears from falling.  Her throat shook.  She was so young—­only a child herself!  A broad shaft of sunshine covered her small figure; her red dress glowed in the living light.