“Well, it is only natural she should.”
“Natural! Natural to mourn for that baby! Don’t you say stupid things, Johnny. It’s a great mercy that it has been taken; and you must know that as well as any one.”
“I don’t say it isn’t; babies must make no end of noise and work; but you see mothers care for them.”
“Don’t be a simpleton, Johnny. If you take to upholding tramps and infants dying in sheds, goodness knows what you’ll come to in time.”
At the end of a fortnight, Ashton of Timberdale and his wife came home. It was a fine afternoon in the middle of January, but getting dusk, and a lot of us had gone over to the Court to see them arrive. Jane looked as happy as a queen.
“Johnny,” she whispered, whilst we were standing to take some tea that Mother Broom (with a white cockade in her cap) brought in upon a silver tray, “how about that poor woman? She is not dead, I hope?”
I told Jane that she was better. The fever had gone down, but she was so weak and reduced that the doctor had not allowed her to be questioned. We knew no more of who she was than we had known before. Mrs. Coney overheard what I was saying, and took Jane aside.
There seemed to be a bit of a battle: Mrs. Coney remonstrating with a severe face, Jane holding out and flushing a little. She was telling Jane not to go to Jael Batty’s, and representing why she ought not to go. Jane said she must go—her heart was set upon it: and began to re-tie her bonnet-strings.