'You have only to write your plain request.'
'If, now I see you, I may speak another request, my lord.'
'Pray,' he said, with courteous patience, and stepped forward down to the street of the miners' cottages. She could there speak out-bawl the request, if it suited her to do so.
On the point of speaking, she gazed round.
'Perfectly safe! no harm possible,' said he, fretful under the burden of this her maniacal maternal anxiety.
'The men are all right, they would not hurt a child. What can rationally be suspected!'
'I know the men; they love their children,' she replied. 'I think my child would be precious to them. Mr. Woodseer and Mr. Edwards and Madge are there.'
'Is the one more request—I mean, a mother's anxiety does not run to the extent of suspecting everybody?'
'Some of the children are very pretty,' said Carinthia, and eyed the bands of them at their games in the roadway and at the cottage doors. 'Children of the poor have happy mothers.'
Her eyes were homely, morning over her face. They were open now to what that fellow Woodseer (who could speak to the point when he was not aiming at it) called the parlour, or social sitting-room; where we may have converse with the tame woman's mind, seeing the door to the clawing recesses temporarily shut.