“Well,” he said, “whoever she belongs to, there are only two courses to be pursued, and the first is to try and find the people who left her here. If we can’t do that, there only remains—”
“What?” asked his wife looking anxiously up at him.
“There only remains—the workhouse, my dear Priscilla.”
Priscilla pressed the child closer to her and stood upright facing him.
“Austin,” she said, “I couldn’t do it. You mustn’t ask me to. I’ll try and find her mother. I’ll put an advertisement in the paper; but I won’t send her to the workhouse. And you couldn’t either. You couldn’t give up a little helpless child when Heaven has laid it at your very threshold.”
Mr Vallance strode quickly up and down the garden path; he foresaw that he would have to yield, and it made him very angry.
“Nonsense, my dear,” he said testily; “people are much too fond of talking about Heaven doing this and that. That ill-looking scamp of a gypsy fellow hadn’t much to do with Heaven, I fancy.”
“Heaven chooses its own instruments,” said Priscilla quietly; and Mr Vallance made no answer, for he had said that very same thing in his last sermon.
“I’ll have those tramps looked after at any rate,” he said, rousing himself with sudden energy. “I’ll send Joe one way, and drive the other way myself in the pony-cart. They can’t have got far yet.”
He hurried out of the garden, and Mrs Vallance was left alone with her prize. It was almost too good to be true. Already her mind was busy with arrangements for the baby’s comfort and making plans for her future—the blue-room looking into the garden for the nursery, and the blacksmith’s eldest daughter for a nurse-maid, and some little white frocks and pinafores made; and what should she be called? Some simple name would do. Mary, perhaps. And then suddenly Mrs Vallance checked herself.