"I'll go," said the woman carelessly. "My word, Jane Adams, but I thought you hated children!"
"So I do!" answered Jane fiercely, "but he would have his sister's, now it's my turn for my sister's!"
As she turned up the stairs her own words came back to her with a sudden qualm. Her sister's child! What about Tom?
He would know that this was not his sister's child—he might even know whose child it was, for he must probably have seen it with Pattie!
But even as the disquieting thought came, a reassuring one followed. Tom was gone away for a month on a special job for his master, and long before that time had elapsed, Pattie would be dismissed and the child could be returned.
Jim did not come home till very late, and when he did, he was more than half intoxicated, and he accepted Jane's story without demur, indeed he scarcely listened to what she said; and as the little girl was still asleep when he went to work in the morning, he really had no idea that there was any addition to his family circle.
Harry was enchanted with a playmate so pretty, so gentle, so near his own age. He wanted to take her to walk in the street to show her off, but Jane promptly boxed his ears and forbade any such thing, on pain of terrific wrath, so Harry contented himself with offering her every toy he possessed, and Maud accepted his attentions like a little queen, and was really quite happy, except when she thought of her mother or Denys. But always there was the same answer to her pleadings to go home.
"To-morrow—to-morrow—if you don't cry."
So the days passed on. Each day Jim drank more and more heavily as he ceased to resist the temptation, and it took stronger hold upon him, and each day Jane grew a little more restless and anxious as she waited for news of Pattie's downfall. She had counted on going over to Old Keston, ostensibly to see her sister and the new baby, but really to pick up any gossip she could about Pattie; but though night after night she made up her mind to go the next day, yet in the morning her heart failed her. The chance of recognition was possible, and to take Maud through the streets to the Nursery, in the glare of the morning sunshine, seemed to be courting discovery. Nor did she dare to leave the child at home alone, because of the neighbours. She would have left Harry alone with the utmost indifference, and locked him in, and he might have been frightened and screamed and cried all day, for all she would have cared, and the neighbours could have made any remarks they liked; but this was different.
She was certainly beginning to be nervous, and she took more beer than she had ever taken before, because she felt so much more cheerful for a little while, and when the inevitable depression it caused, returned, why then she took some more!