"Well, serve him right! only they're sure to make it up again, worse luck! She's too good for him, as her father always said—an ignorant, stuck-up fellow!"
In the meanwhile, in the gathering darkness of that evening, a small covered cart was slowly climbing the long slope of Dog Down.
A man and woman walked by the side of the horse and talked together in low tones. In the cart a child was tied to the seat, muffled in shawls and handkerchiefs, so that Lily in her bright fairness could hardly have been recognised. She was terribly frightened, poor little girl; she was moaning to herself, crying out for John, yet afraid to cry loudly, for the woman, after petting and cajoling her at first, had threatened to beat her within an inch of her life if she made any noise.
It had all been very puzzling, and Lily could not understand it. She had very vague ideas of her own past life, but she had a notion, half from memory, half from the talk of other children, that Mrs. Randal was not really her mother, nor John her brother; that she had been found somehow and brought home—to the home which she loved and never wished to leave again. And now this woman, who came out of the public-house with smiles and admiring words and sticks of candy, and kissed her, and looked wonderfully pleased to see her, had enticed her into the house "just for a minute," and the man who was playing the organ had followed with a very unpleasant grin on his pale face, and they looked at Lily's locket, and said to each other, "It's her sure enough! Well, this is a piece of luck!" And the woman had looked hurriedly at her other clothes, and kissed her again, and told her she was a sweet child and her poor mother had found her again, and now she would come along with them, wouldn't she? and they would show her no end of pretty things, and she should have a new frock and a necklace and lots of barley-sugar, and dance to the organ as much as ever she liked. But by this time Lily had become alarmed and dissatisfied. She did not like the woman's red face, and shrank away from her kisses; as for the man, he looked ugly and cruel, and she was frightened. She cried and stamped her foot, and said, "No, you ain't my mother. I want to go back to my mother—I want to go back to John."
"Make yourself easy, pretty one," said the man. "I don't know who John may be, but he's no business with you. And as for your mother, she's a long distance off."
"There—didn't I tell you it was me?" said the woman.
"You won't get her to believe that in a hurry," he said, with a hoarse laugh.
Then they agreed it was best to start as soon as possible, before any friends the child might have should begin a search for her; and so they changed their tone, silencing her with rough threats, and wrapped her up and smuggled her away under the tilt of the cart, unknown even to the people of the Travellers' Joy.
