“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.

“‘Don’t I!’ he cried.  ’I am going to talk to him a bit.  Frightening a poor woman like this.’

“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said.  ‘He is dead.’

“He struck with his stick at the mud.

“‘And there’s the child.’

“Then, after thinking deeply for a while—­“’I don’t know that it isn’t for the best.’

“That’s what he said.  And she says nothing at all now.  Not a word of him.  Never.  Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields?  He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen.  She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer.  She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’  She calls him Johnny—­which means Little John.

“It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her.  Does she ever think of the past?  I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness.  The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare.  And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one—­the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.”