"She'll be good till I come back," said the woman, turning up the lane that led to the farm.
The small person with the brown eyes was probably accustomed to be handed about. She did not jib at strangers, as might have been expected, but accepted the situation quite amiably. She gurgled in response to Diana's advances, and allowed herself to be amused. Perhaps the vicinity of horses was familiar to her, and she felt at home. Diana, hugging her on her knee, freed her from the folds of the shawl and allowed her to kick happily. She was certainly a fascinating little mortal.
In the course of about ten minutes Miss Carr, who had been having a chat at the farm about gardening prospects, returned leisurely down the lane, and was electrified to find Diana sitting by the roadside nursing a baby.
"I didn't see any gipsy woman come up to the farm," she said, in answer to the girls' explanations. "You'd better go, Wendy, and see if you can find her, and tell her to come at once and fetch her baby."
So Wendy went up the lane to the farm, and asked at the front door and the back door, and looked round the stack-yard and the buildings, but there was never a trace of the gipsy girl. A little boy playing by the pond, however, declared that he had seen a woman crossing the field and climbing over the fence on to the road. Wendy returned with this report. Miss Carr looked annoyed.
"We must go along the road, then, and follow her. We can't wait here till she chooses to come back."
So Diana carried the baby, and Wendy led Lady and Topsy, and Miss Carr, with an anxious wrinkle between her eyebrows, followed with Baron in the direction that the small boy had pointed out. They walked a mile, and enquired at cottages and from passers-by, and from men working in the fields, but nobody had seen the gipsy woman. Then they went back to the trysting-place to see if she had returned, but she was not there. They asked again at the farm, and went back to the cottages, and Miss Carr begged to leave the baby there, because its mother would be sure to enquire for it and find it. The occupants of the cottages, however, shook their heads, and were not at all prepared to accept the responsibility. Neither were the people at the farm. They utterly refused to take it in. Then Diana realized that it is one thing to offer to nurse a baby, and quite another to get rid of it again. What were they to do?
"We can't dump the poor mite down by the roadside and leave it," said Miss Carr distractedly. "Whatever can have become of its mother?"
No answer was forthcoming to her question, and matters were urgent. She decided that the only thing to be done was to take the baby with them to Pendlemere, leaving messages at the farm and the cottages for the mother to follow on and claim it. Naturally it made a great sensation in the school when Diana arrived holding her foundling in her arms. Miss Carr explained at full length to Miss Todd, who was utterly aghast, but consented to take in the small stranger till it was claimed. Miss Chadwick, who had studied hygiene at the Agricultural College, and had once assisted at a crèche, constituted herself head nurse, mixed a bottle, and left Miss Ormrod to feed the fowls while she sat in a rocking-chair and soothed the foundling to sleep.
"Surely the mother'll turn up before dark," she said.