"It's jist as yer honour sees it," answered she.
For a while Herbert stood still, looking round him, for the woman was so motionless and uncommunicative that he hardly knew how to talk to her. That she was in the lowest depth of distress was evident enough, and it behoved him to administer to her immediate wants before he left her; but what could he do for one who seemed to be so indifferent to herself? He stood for a time looking round him till he could see through the gloom that there was a bundle of straw lying in the dark corner beyond the hearth, and that the straw was huddled up, as though there were something lying under it. Seeing this he left the bridle of his horse, and stepping across the cabin moved the straw with the handle of his whip. As he did so he turned his back from the wall in which the small window-hole had been pierced, so that a gleam of light fell upon the bundle at his feet, and he could see that the body of a child was lying there, stripped of every vestige of clothing.
For a minute or two he said nothing—hardly, indeed, knowing how to speak, and looking from the corpselike woman back to the lifelike corpse, and then from the corpse back to the woman, as though he expected that she would say something unasked. But she did not say a word, though she so turned her head that her eyes rested on him.
He then knelt down and put his hand upon the body, and found that it was not yet stone cold. The child apparently had been about four years old, while that still living in her arms might perhaps be half that age.
"Was she your own?" asked Herbert, speaking hardly above his breath.
"'Deed, yes!" said the woman. "She was my own, own little Kitty." But there was no tear in her eye or gurgling sob audible from her throat.
"And when did she die?" he asked.
"'Deed, thin, and I don't jist know—not exactly;" and sinking lower down upon her haunches, she put up to her forehead the hand with which she had supported herself on the floor—the hand which was not occupied with the baby, and pushing back with it the loose hairs from her face, tried to make an effort at thinking.
"She was alive in the night, wasn't she?" he said.
"I b'lieve thin she was, yer honour. 'Twas broad day, I'm thinking, when she guv' over moaning. She warn't that way when he went away."